Search Results for
"Students"

This paper demonstrates the use of conceptual modelling to assist with the competence development of adult learners with interrupted occupational and learning careers. The research introduces a self-evaluation approach used with a group of adult female students in the United Kingdom. The study aimed at increasing learners' awareness of the qualities and nature of their individual learning processes. The paper applies Kontiainen's dynamic concept analysis modelling method as a tool to assist individual students in the evaluation of their personal competences in learning. The findings of the current study suggest that providing adult learners with opportunities to evaluate their own competences may facilitate a process of making their skills visible to themselves as well as to their tutors and employers. This aims to increase their motivation to use and develop their competences. The paper provides an example and a demonstration of the self-evaluation process in action illustrated by two case studies. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

This paper explores the nature and development of competence in speech-language pathology and is informed by the development and validation of a competency-based assessment tool to assess Australian speech-language pathology students' professional performance in the workplace (COMPASS®). Background is provided on speech-language pathology competency frameworks in Australia and a systematic program of research to validate this assessment tool. Findings relevant to understanding the nature and development of speech-language pathology competency are described. The domains of competence considered important for practice were found to extend beyond specific processes of professional practice to include generic competencies of Reasoning, Communication, Lifelong Learning, and Professionalism. The achievement of competency was identified as developmental, and clinical educators were found to validly and reliably identify seven levels of competency development. Competency may transfer across the scope of practice, and marginal students' performances were characterized by a high degree of variability. These findings are discussed in relation to the profession's understanding of competency and speech-language pathology education, professional development, and further research. © 2011 The Speech Pathology Association of Australia Limited.

This study compared two work-based learning interventions, service learning and paid in-ternships, across group and time on work performance and social competence among high school students with emotional and behavioral disorders (N=57). Results found a significant interaction effect for group and time, favoring service learning, on several dimensions of work performance and social competence, including work motivation, personal presentation, overall social competence, peer relations, and school adjustment.

Attention to the inequitable distribution and limited access to primary health care resources is key to addressing the priority health needs of underserved populations in rural, remote and outer metropolitan areas. There is little high-quality evidence about improving access to quality primary health care services for underserved groups, particularly in relation to geographic barriers, and limited discussion about the training implications of reforms to improve access. To progress equity in access to primary health care services, health professional education institutions need to work with both the health sector and policy makers to address issues of workforce mix, recruitment and retention, and new models of primary health care delivery. This requires a fundamental shift in focus from these institutions and the health sector, to each view themselves as partners in an integrated teaching, research and service-oriented health system. This paper discusses the challenges and opportunities for primary health care professionals, educators and the health sector in providing quality teaching and clinical experiences for increasing numbers of health professionals as a result of the reform agenda. It then outlines some practical strategies based on theory and evolving experience for dealing with some of these challenges and capitalising on opportunities. © 2011 La Trobe University.

[No abstract available]

The aim was to identify a set of competences for the Flemish academic Master of Nursing and Obstetrics degree that answer perceived needs in health care. The competency model was to demonstrate a degree of consensus among key nurses.The study was conducted in all Flemish hospitals registered to have 400 beds or more. Head nurses of surgery, geriatrics and intensive care units were eligible to participate, as well as one nurse from administration per hospital. A two round Delphi process allowed participants to comment on items identified in an analysis of existing international competency profiles of master level nurses and adapted to the Flemish context. Competences agreed to by 90% of the respondents were considered to have consensus.Fifteen out of 19 eligible hospitals were recruited in the study, 45 nurses participated in the Delphi panel. Consensus was reached on 31 competences that can be assigned to 5 nurse's roles: nursing expert, innovator, researcher, educator and manager. The resulting competency profile is in accordance with published profiles for similar programs.The reported study demonstrates a practical method to develop a consensus competency model for an academic master program based on the input of key individuals in mainstream nursing. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.

It is difficult for traditional model of teaching to satisfy the talent cultivation and teaching development requirements of higher vocational education. Project-based learning has the advantages of cultivating the practical ability of students and exploring their professional potential, thus it has attracted more and more attention from higher vocational educators. Combining the model of project-based learning and the network technology, based on the design of project-based teaching of higher vocational courses, this paper has designed a project-based teaching support system of higher vocational courses based on the network, which provides a new methodology for higher vocational education to improve the quality of talent cultivation and conduct project teaching reform of competence. © 2011 IEEE.

To prepare better qualified workers, we developed a simulation training base for high vocational students of construction major. Simulation base is as close as possible to real professional environment. it reflects the latest technology and professional requirements. It also reveals the process of building construction. Situation base shortened the time for students to adapting the post jobs. It enable students learn and master the advanced technology of the profession and applications of technology skills in a short time Period. The real situations also stimulated student's interest in fulfilling a task while they have a certain sense of satisfaction. It inspired student's desire to explore. © 2011 IEEE.

Educational studies as a discipline is now a feature in many British universities, but little research has been undertaken to explore what kinds of student choose the subject, how easily they access it or how they fare as undergraduate students. This article attempts to address this paucity of research by drawing on a selection of findings from a study undertaken with undergraduate students between 2004 and 2007. The study tracks the progress of a single cohort of students, some from vocational backgrounds and some from traditional academic backgrounds, on a full-time, three-year BA Honours educational studies degree. The article initially provides a discussion relating to the historical place of educational studies as a subject for study at undergraduate level and suggests how this links to the British widening-participation agenda. This provides a context for the subsequent sections, which present a selection of findings from the three-year research project. The project was designed to explore the students' experiences by asking which of them were accepted to undertake the degree by admissions staff, how they fared on the degree and, critically, whether their pre-entry qualifications had an impact on their progress and success. This article provides some answers to these questions which suggest that admissions staff are more cautious in accepting vocational entry qualifications, but that the nature of these has little bearing on ultimate success on the degree. It concludes by suggesting how this knowledge might impact on information for potential applicants and on the selection of students in the future. © 2011 Copyright UCU.

Advocates of PBL have explored ways to create meaningful understandings of STEM ideas and skills in students by having them solve problems and projects, including design tasks, that range from the well- to the ill-defined, are set within contexts that students consider authentic and sometimes cross disciplinary boundaries. Two learning outcomes are relevant to doing informed design and contain elements of both scientific inquiry and engineering design are described in this chapter. Design rules-of-thumb are contextualized generalizations that link the effects of varying product features with performance outcomes, and lie somewhere in the middle of a continuum that on one end holds abstractions of science and engineering science (e.g., Newton’s Laws of Motion; Hook’s Law), and on the other end craft-like recipes for effective practice. Their use can complement the case-based reasoning and deductive thinking that designers employ when making informed design decisions. Diagnositic troubleshooting is a critical design strategy that is essential for designers to use in order to improve ideas and prototypes over multiple iterations. The dilemma of using constructivist or direct instruction approaches (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) to achieve will likely inspire debate long into the future, and may only be resolved when researchers and teachers can place “thinking caps” on learners and get real-time imaging of actual neural activity to reveal differential impacts of different instructional interventions. Until that time comes, educators who want to use design projects to teach STEM subjects should weigh the benefits and tradeoffs of each approach (see Matrix Pattern E) before making their instruction choices, and as well should look to future research to inform this longstanding debate. Such research should clearly articulate the operational definitions and “vector of instructional components” for all approaches being considered, as Klahr has recently suggested (2010), and assess their impacts on gains in students’ STEM learning and capacity to do “informed designing.” I would add that testing with “impoverished” forms of any instructional approach should be avoided. Asking students to design without scaffolding, where in essence students would need to invent the mechanical elements needed to construct a device, or discover laws of physics and engineering based on experiments they run, has little chance for success or value as research that can inform classroom practice. The smart use of scaffolding is a must when doing and testing design-based project work, as it has been with other flavors of PBL (Hmelo-Silver, Duncan, & Chinn, 2007). The direct instruction treatment in this proposed study might include strategies like simply reading about the engineering design process (Atman and Bursic, 1996), cognitive tutoring, providing subjects finished models of designed products and worked examples showing the thinking of experts doing design tasks. The constructivist treatment in the proposed research might use materials developed in line with the three curriculum design principles that Kanter (2010) describes for building meaningful science understandings with design projects. These include: (a) motivating students with a need to learn key STEM concepts, (b) helping students construct these ideas via first-hand experiences, and (c) helping students structure their new knowledge for successful retrieval when designing. The pedagogical recommendations associated with re-introducing design courses into undergraduate engineering programs that were made by a small group of engineering educators in the early 1960s in effect identified an Achilles heel of direct instruction of the day and attempted to redress it. The flaw may relate to a problem of a certain type of transfer – a review of the transfer literature as it relates to ETE can be found in chapter No. four in this volume, contributed by Johnson, Dixon, Daugherty and Oenardi. students in the 1960s who developed proficiency in solving well-defined problems did mainly tasks involving analysis (e.g., solving end-of-chapter problems in a heat transfer course), but very little synthesis, which is a central component to design thinking (Jones, 1984, p. 63). What the Committee on Engineering Design (1961) described as lacking in engineering undergraduates whose training mainly involved solving well-defined engineering science problems was that they had not developing intellectually and attitudinally to deal with the risks, uncertainties and challenges of solving ill-defined design problems and projects. What they recommended was not to replace engineering science with design, nor to continue with the engineering science status quo, but to employ a hybrid approach that involved the scheduling and coordination of both kinds of courses and instruction. The constructivist versus direct instruction dilemma and debate has ignored this third pedagogical option and potential treatment for the proposed study – the use of a hybrid approach that combines the two instructional methods. The research being proposed here should therefore also test a “multi-attribute” hybrid instructional treatment, one that blends constructivist and direct instruction approaches. Subjects in the hybrid group at times might explore materials to build connections with prior knowledge and face the challenge of proposing and constructing new ideas. At other times, they would experience direct instruction to build relevant science and engineering science ideas in long-term memory so that they could produce meaningful explanations regarding how their devices do and do not work. Among the teaching strategies that might be included in this third treatment would be approaches that bridge inquiry and design and support students in developing and using design rules-of-thumb and doing effective diagnostic troubleshooting. The proposed research study would report on the degree to which each of the three instructional approaches – constructivist, direct instruction and hybrid – helped students in schools learn STEM disciplinary knowledge and skills, and gain confidence and self-efficacy in addressing and completing design projects. Such research would be critical to ETE practitioners because it could help them better prepare students to engage in similar enterprises with competence in the workplaces of the future. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.