Developing a postgraduate work-based curriculum using an Intervention Mapping Approach

Advanced practitioner skill development has become an important focus in health service delivery as increasingly complex consumer needs, practice environments and national professional registration requirements impact on professional work practices. Increasingly, work-based or workplace learning experiences are being seen as an effective means for maintaining skill currency across working lives. Currently there is limited literature on pedagogical practices to support the educational and training requirements associated with development across a person's working life. This paper reports on an example of how an intervention mapping framework was used to guide the development, implementation and evaluation of a work-based praxis course for students in an interprofessional, online postgraduate mental health programme. The intervention mapping framework provided a stepped process to guide decision-making and allowed the incorporation of theory and evidence into the course design. This approach provided a stepped process to guide decision-making and allowed the incorporation of theory and evidence into the course design. While the use of the intervention mapping framework is often used within health promotion arenas, particularly for the effective design of health promotion educational programmes, it is argued that this framework can be utilised effectively when developing curriculum for use within higher education programmes.     

Teacher and administrator perceptions of gender in the classroom

Gendered stereotypes persist in American classrooms despite efforts to create equitable learning environments. Within this qualitative study, we examined both teachers’ and administrators’ perceptions of gender in the classroom and present the data of the continued gender bias among some educators in their own words. The data showed teachers and administrators attributed conflict styles based upon gender and consistently reference boys conflict resolution style as “over quickly” in contrast to girls conflict resolution style. Likewise, participants’ gendered perceptions extended to the kinds of feedback they expected girls and boys to prefer. Additionally, our findings show that participants misunderstood or lacked knowledge of scientifically sound research and participants described changing the curriculum in a single-sex class/school to use stereotypical topics and activities for student engagement. The authors suggest this data should open a discussion between education scholars and practitioners to help align current knowledge about gender and development and implications of stereotypes for classroom practice.     

Improving Achievement Using Digital Pedagogy: Impact of a Research Practice Partnership in New Zealand

This present study reports the impact of a research–practice partnership among nine collaborating schools and researchers in Auckland, New Zealand. The goals of the partnership were to refine digital instruction in ways that would result in improved learning processes and achievement. The partners employed a design-based research approach to iteratively develop and test changes to the pedagogy. Results indicate moderate to large effect sizes in writing, and small effect sizes in reading and mathematics. Results also indicate increasing effects over time in reading and writing, but not in mathematics. Educational effects included greater use of discussions by teachers and greater use of open-ended activity types. These outcomes are discussed in relation to features of the partnership as well as digital pedagogy.     

Social and cognitive correlates of children's lying behavior

The relation between children's lie-telling and their social and cognitive development was examined. Children (3–8 years) were told not to peek at a toy. Most children peeked and later lied about peeking. Children's subsequent verbal statements were not always consistent with their initial denial and leaked critical information revealing their deceit. Children's conceptual moral understanding of lies, executive functioning, and theory-of-mind understanding were also assessed. Children's initial false denials were related to their first-order belief understanding and their inhibitory control. Children's ability to maintain their lies was related to their second-order belief understanding. Children's lying was related to their moral evaluations. These findings suggest that social and cognitive factors may play an important role in children's lie-telling abilities.     

Testing collective memory: Representing the Soviet Union on multiple-choice questions

This article tests the assumption that state-mandated multiple-choice history exams are a cultural tool for disseminating an ‘official’ collective memory. Findings from a qualitative study of a collection of multiple-choice questions that relate to the history of the Soviet Union are presented. The 263 questions all come from New York State Regents exams that were administered between 1980–2010. Test questions were organized by decade, analysed for content, and then synthesized into historical narratives. These narratives were then analysed to see the extent to which they changed as the Soviet Union decayed, collapsed, and then broke up into new nation states. Particular attention was paid to the period that begins with the Cold War and ends with the present situation in post-Soviet Russia. The analysis shows that, despite great upheavals in the history of the Soviet Union, and changes in New York State standards and testing policies, the narrative that exists on these exam questions largely remains the same. This suggests that official narratives are slow to change. Further research should look at the extent to which test-taker knowledge and acceptance of official narratives affect performance on multiple-choice history items.     

Novel application of a predictive skill retention model to technical VLE content production skills among Higher Education teachers: a case study

Periods of no practice in performing a technical procedure may impact on the retention of the procedural skills required to produce VLE content. This exploratory paper reports a case study into the application of a validated skills retention model, the User Decision Aid (UDA). Use of the UDA results in a series of indicative retention rates predicting how long the procedures required to carry out Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) content production tasks will be remembered. Considerable variability in retention rates for differing VLE content production tasks was indicated. The study reveals that improvement in predicted VLE content production skills retention rates may be observed when a quality job aid is available and the mental processing complexity resulting from conducting VLE tasks is reduced. Outputs from this research can inform the design of VLEs, lead to the development of targeted training for teaching staff, and the better design of effective resources in order to mitigate skills fade in VLE content production tasks.