Search Results for
"learning"

This critical examination, based on in-depth interviews with current and former students from sport management academic programs in the United States, provides insight into how the academic internship is being reconfigured at the nexus of higher education and the sport industry. Drawing on the concept of hope labour, the analysis illustrates that sport management student internships in the sport industry are increasingly experienced and rationalised as future-oriented ‘investments’ and ‘opportunities’. It sheds light on coercive market forces behind increased internship participation and illustrates how the sport industry often fails to provide proper learning contexts for students to develop skills and advance their careers. We argue that sport management internships experienced, rationalised, and institutionalised as a form of hope labour obscures and contributes to the reproduction of exploitative realities and substandard experiential learning practices within the sport industry. © 2022 Pedagogy, Culture & Society.

This paper investigates the impact of digital creativity educational practices on the improvement of academic performance and creative thinking development of Chinese high school students. The study defined the importance of the concept of STEM learning in the development of modern skills needed to live and work in a digital socio-economic change caused by the development of Industry 4.0. An educational experiment involving 60 9th grade Chinese students evaluated the impact of digital creativity learning practices on the development of students’ creative thinking on such indicators as fluency, flexibility, originality, detailing, and metaphoricity. The impact of digital creative learning practices on the performance of students in the control group and the experimental group was assessed. The analysis of the results of practical research on the impact of digital tools and pedagogical models of learning on the acquisition of students’ creative thinking skills was conducted, which proved that the digital environment is the optimal place for students’ creative manifestations and provides opportunities to improve creative thinking skills by implementing learning practical activities using innovative tools for the manifestation of digital creative skills. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Prior learning assessment (PLA) uses testing or competency portfolios to assess and grant credit for college-level learning, thus offering personal and professional empowerment to adult learners. The purpose of this review was to systematically examine global academic literature related to PLA over a decade. An earlier review of U.S. literature focused solely on PLA, but this review focused on the globally used term recognition of prior learning (RPL) and prior learning assessment and recognition (PLAR). Data collection followed a structured process to identify all peer-reviewed journal articles published over a decade that meet inclusion criteria. Data analysis included thematic coding to identify categories leading to themes. Major findings included journals publishing about PLA, author perspectives and affiliations, underlying empirical studies, and eight major themes: studies of programs, policy and systems, studies of PLA, technology tools, theory building, assessment practices, workplace applications of PLA, and immigration. © 2022 Association for Continuing Higher Education.

Concerns about the poor outcomes from school-based vocational education, which is heavily concentrated in schools serving disadvantaged communities, has led the State Government of Victoria, Australia, to implement major reforms, including abolishing the Victoria Certificate of Applied learning. Instead, from 2023, learning in vocational education will be recognised as a vocational major within Victorian Certificate of Education (which is used to regulate admission of school leavers into higher education). This article draws on the new localism and field theory literatures to position the reforms as an attempt improve the provision of school-based vocational education through localising delivery of SBVE to meet demand for skill in the local labour market. Improving the matching process is seen to lead to a range of positive outcomes for students. The paper provides an assessment of the likely impact of the reforms, with a focus on the building trades, and argues that while aspects of the reforms may help some students, they are unlikely deliver the changes needed to create productive pathways to quality work for all. © 2023 The Vocational Aspect of Education Ltd.

The on-going implementation of the new curriculum of the new education system in Kenya includes the administration of technology in the classroom. In this study, this was achieved through the use of a gamified app in a local private school in Kenya, a gamified Swahili app. As Swahili is the language that is Kenya's national and one of two official languages, it is an important language to master in school. The inclusion of a gamified app in addition to the traditional material used in the classroom is to increase their motivation, and engagement of the language learning process of the students. The participants expressed the enjoyment that they felt as they used the gamified app to supplement the material that they had been given to practice. This pilot study used both qualitative (using a questionnaire) and quantitative methods to gather the results of the control group (CG) and experimental group (EG) to ascertain the impact of their understanding through the pre- and posttest that the students did. The EG showed substantial improvement in the posttest after using the gamified app t(21) = −2.783, p = 0.011. Additionally, the students reported that they enjoyed using the gamified app to practice their Swahili reading comprehension materials. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Transversal skills development is an essential component of doctoral education. The COVID-19 pandemic required the adaptation of five transversal skills modules to online delivery. Instructional design was used to create synchronous and asynchronous teaching to a Virtual learning Environment. Feedback surveys were used to analyse student perceptions as to whether learning outcomes (LOs) were met and student satisfaction with the online format with a view to optimising future delivery of these modules. Of the 168 students surveyed, 84 (50.0%) responded. Based on 84 responses across five modules, students perceived that 394 (97.0%) of the LOs were met (p < 0.001). Statistically significant advantages to online delivery were found to be convenience, easy visibility of materials, timing of delivery and learning at own pace (p < 0.001). Importantly, 40 (47.6%) students would have struggled to achieve the necessary credits without this online training. 77 (91.7%) students found the online modules very useful or useful for their current research and 78 (92.9%) students reported them as being very useful or useful for their future career. A majority found online delivery more effective for their needs than the face-to-face format. These findings support the effectiveness of online delivery of transversal skills modules in doctoral programmes. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

School-based vocational education and training (VET) systems are undergoing important changes with a view to strengthening their work-based learning component and, overall, their relationships with the local production environment. This paper looks at the introduction of dual VET in the Basque Country within the Spanish and European contexts. Based on an analysis of existing official information and literature as well as qualitative research carried out by the authors, the distinctive characteristics of the Basque system are documented and studied. It is shown that there has been a continuity in the ideas and relationships which have configured its trajectory from the early 1980s onwards, and that new instruments and elements of the system have been developed in the region even before those elements were fully formalised at national level in Spain. © 2023 The Vocational Aspect of Education Ltd.

Purpose: This study attempts to determine a set of characteristics for each educational component in the competence-based agricultural education system. Design: This study reviewed 95 articles published in four relevant scientific journals to determine the characteristics of a competence-based higher agricultural education system. These characteristics were determined based on competence-based education principles. Findings: The results of this review indicated that, based on the CBE principles, the competencies for agricultural educational components identified in the reviewed articles could be summarized in 22 categories. Practical implications: The main practical implication is that the universities can consider the results of this study as a set of guidelines in the admission of qualified learners and educators, revising curriculum and organizing dynamic learning environment in line with the CBE characteristics. Theoretical implications: The results of this study could take CBE principles one step further in that, determining characteristics of a competence-based higher agricultural education system can be a guideline on how these principles could be implemented in an education system. Originality/value: This study is original because it tries to bring CBE principles as a valuable theory into practice by the agricultural education systems. © 2023 Wageningen University.

This article presents an overview of educational robotics (ER) in primary and preschool education. As ER seems to be gaining popularity for its effectiveness as a learning tool, more research needs to be done in this area. Recent results from ER pilot projects advocate for the integration of ER in K-12 education curricula. On the other hand, teachers may face various difficulties in carrying out such activities due to lack of experience or knowledge in this field. Previous research has shown that ER is still an open field for exploration. Even though an increasing number of experiences are available for the use of robotic tools in early education, there is not enough empirical evidence on the features they need to present for young learners to perceive them as attractive and easy to use. In addition, the high cost of some tools may prevent educational institutions from using them systematically. To detect possible gaps in the current research, in the context of this work, 21 articles representing ER applications and frameworks were collected and reviewed between 2011 and 2021. The results of this study demonstrate that ER can be a valuable tool for supporting primary and preschool students. However, the review supports that more research is needed on the technical features that a robotic tool must have to be successfully introduced to students of this age. Moreover, future work is needed to develop low-cost ER tools so they can become more accessible to educational institutions. © 2008-2011 IEEE.

The aim of this study is to examine what it means to be a student in a vocational education and training programme in the municipal adult education system in Sweden and how the interplay between school and working life affects students’ identity formation. To achieve this, 12 students from two different programmes have been interviewed at the end of their education: one group of assistant nurses and one group of floor layers. The results show that learning a vocation and developing a vocational identity is a journey through different practices with whom students both identify and dis-identify themselves. In these processes of identification, students can also undergo personal development in a broader sense or develop an identity as an adult. Understanding adult student identities, in particular how they see themselves as learners, can be beneficial for those working with and in adult learning. Furthermore, what the school teaches may conflict with the expectations and daily demands of working life, creating a divide between practices. Understanding the divide between school and working life, and how students are affected by this divide, can also facilitate the understanding of their vocational identity development process. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.