Search Results for
"learning"

The advent of the global information society and a myriad of other rapidly changing variables are presenting many new and unique challenges for the twenty-first century workforce, and perhaps the most pressing of these challenges is actually meeting the needs for qualified workers to fill the positions in emerging and growing fields. One such field is the nuclear industry. In fact, the nuclear industry is on the verge of a workforce crisis with a need for more than 57% of current radiation protection technicians (RPTs) in the United States to be replaced in the next ten years. The University of Missouri was awarded a Department of Labor grant to build an associates of applied science curriculum for the next generation of RPTs. After determining that the dominant approach to RPT training in the industry is via memorisation and recall, the question for the development team became how to best advance a vocational curriculum that provides innovative approaches to knowledge acquisition in meaningful contexts in an enterprise that has a relatively narrow view of learning. In the current article the process the curriculum development team underwent to approach this question is provided, along with the theoretical framework used to guide development of the curriculum and the resulting curricular design. The impact that this curriculum may have on higher order cognition and knowledge generalisation is discussed. Of particular note is the design and development of an ASK system, an online learning support system, to bolster the practical and theoretical aims of the curriculum. © 2008 The Vocational Aspect of Education Ltd.

This article describes how competence-based learning (CBL) can be organised in vocational education by integrating elements from a holistic instructional design model with recent ideas on assessment. A curriculum based on this model is pre-eminently suitable for an assessment approach emphasising that proof of competence is gathered by having learners perform authentic tasks under changing assessment conditions at regular intervals. The results are stored in a so-called electronic assessment portfolio. The portfolio is constructed according to the Protocol Portfolio Scoring (PPS). The value of PPS for flexible, demand-driven vocational education is discussed. © 2008 The Vocational Aspect of Education Ltd.

This article discusses the pedagogical relevance of a research project into professional subtitling practices in Italy which is coordinated by the author at the University of Bologna. The key feature of this initiative relates to its collaborative dynamics: research is carried out by students writing their final dissertations, working together as a team and pooling their resources and findings. The author contends that taking part in this collective enquiry-based experience is as important for the students as the actual results of their investigation and discusses in detail the pedagogical benefits of this approach. The article begins by describing the inception stages of the project, conceived as an attempt to capitalize on the traditionally high weighting of the final dissertation within Italian degree programmes - and hence on the important amount of effort that students are likely to put into it. After describing the pedagogical and research tools used in the project, the paper goes on to present the results achieved in the first 2-3 years of the project's life; illustrate how the students' work has influenced the author's teaching practices as a subtitler trainer; and evaluate the implications of this experience for translator training in general. © St. Jerome Publishing, Manchester.

Training posts in primary care or hospital practice settings provide rich learning opportunities for trainees. Trainees will appreciate and benefit from support for their learning in the clinical setting, exposure to modern teaching methods and constructive feedback. Planning is very much at the heart of productive learning: both planning for single teaching episodes and planning on what should be achieved overall during an attachment.

The UK educational assessment landscape is changing, characterised by attempts to create more flexible pathways through learning. This has led to attempts to formalise the comparative relationships between different general and vocational qualifications. The National Qualifications Framework (NQF), the Framework for Achievement and the Framework for Higher Education Qualifications in England, Wales and Northern Ireland all seek to explore the potential for comparing the value of different qualifications. These initiatives mirror other international trends, such as the implementation of the Australian Qualifications Framework. Grading is a potential enabling tool for comparing different qualifications. This is visible in the way that the NQF uses General Certificate of Secondary Education grades C and D to discriminate between Levels 2 and 3 of the framework. This article focuses on the challenges posed for competency-based qualifications in the light of such national and international moves towards developing unified qualifications frameworks. This is important given the strong traditional relationship between competency-based qualifications and binary (pass/fail or competent/not yet competent) reporting and its historically ambivalent relationship with grading techniques. The article also discusses some of the particular issues that are relevant when competency-based assessments are graded. © 2008, UCU.

Although work-related identity research has undergone considerable expansion in recent years, vocational identity among students remains a neglected area. However, initial vocational education plays a crucial role in the process of lifelong learning. Accordingly, this chapter discusses students’ vocational identity formation during their vocational education and training. As recent findings on vocational or professional identity emphasise its context-based or sociocultural construction, we examined students’ vocational identity formation in two different fields: 1) technology and transport, and 2) social services and health care. Our quantitative data indicate that while students’ vocational identity formation begins during vocational education and training, there are differences between students in different fields. On the basis of our qualitative data it seems that students’ vocational identity is heavily constructed in line with the education practices of their own specific fields. Thus, experiences during vocational education, even before individuals enter the workforce, play an important role in the formation of vocational identity. © 2008 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

English competency is known as one of the crucial skills in various social contexts in Hong Kong. In tertiary educational setting, English courses do not focus solely on the development of the four language skills. Rather, they put emphasis on the application of English Language for academic use or instrumental use. This paper will investigate the effectiveness of the implementation of competency-based ESL teaching and the learning situation of a group of 70 pre-service teachers of Chinese in a Hong Kong tertiary institute. This paper also intends to draw implications from our findings to answer the following questions: (1) How do tertiary students respond to competencybased ESL teaching and learning? (2) What are the difficulties in implementing competencybased approach? (3) What implications has competency-based ESL teaching and learning drawn to assessment and material design in Hong Kong context? Through answering the above questions, it is hoped that light can be shed on competency-based ESL researches and give insights to the development of competency-based ESL teaching in terms of material design and assessment.

This introductory chapter discusses the development of considerations about learning through work and perspectives of workplace learning that are currently emerging through research internationally. A key purpose here is to map recent developments in thinking about learning through and for work. When one also considers individuals’ needs to be learners as workers as they seek to secure continuity and development within their working life and social world, such perspectives help to inform how we might best organise, shape and appraise the character and processes of learning through and for work. This concern is never more important than when such learning is conceptualised simultaneously as processes of both social reproduction and transformation and of individual development and change. The chapter provides a bridge between existing contributions to our understanding about learning through work and the contributions offered in the following chapters. In doing so, it seeks to identify the strengths and the limitations of existing perspectives through theoretical and empirical work by focussing on the interdependent relations between the individual and social world in the processes of learning through and for work. Thus, it also foreshadows the analytic categories: (i) learning about self and agency; and (ii) learning about work tasks, that shape the structure of the book. In advancing these two bases as being particularly salient for elaborating understandings about learning for working life, the chapter first outlines the scope of the emerging interest in learning through work, as well as some of the purposes for and conceptions of learning through work. Next, procedural and conceptual developments that shape and reshape considerations of workplace learning are discussed. The chapter concludes by offering some parameters for workplace learning as a duality between what the workplace affords learners in terms of opportunities and support, and how individuals engage with these affordances as they learn through their experiences. © 2008 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the factors associated with hospitality students' satisfaction with internship programs and the relationships between training, job satisfaction, and confidence about future careers in order to provide schools and industries with suggestions regarding course development and training during internships. A principal component analysis was used to determine the degree of satisfaction with the supervisor, the educational program, the environment, the administration, and relationships. Training classes made a significant difference in satisfaction with the supervisor and educational program. The regression analysis showed that training satisfaction played a positive role as a predictor of participants' job satisfaction and confidence about future careers. The effect of satisfaction with training on participants' confidence about future careers was mediated by their satisfaction with the internship. The administration and learning factors in connection with participants' satisfaction during the internship were found to be significant predicators of their confidence about future careers, but supervision, environment, and interpersonal relations were not. © 2007 by The Haworth Press. All rights reserved.

Objective: The object of this study was to establish what residents in 1994 and 2003 characterised as an ideal clinical teacher and whether differences existed between residents' views in 1994 and 2003. Study design: Setting: postgraduate medical education in the Netherlands. Subjects: 207 obstetric-gynaecologic residents. Intervention: open-ended questionnaire. Analysis: qualitative data analysis with two coding dictionaries based on current literature. Differences between 1994 and 2003 were estimated using the Chi-square test. Results: Residents preferred the 'person' role both in 1994 (42%) and in 2003 (48%). The 'physician' role was significantly more important in 1994 than in 2003; the 'supervisor' role was significantly more important in 2003 than in 1994 (p < 0.05). Seventy percent of the comments related to 'direct interaction' (i.e., between residents and clinical teachers), 30% to 'indirect interaction' (i.e., clinical teachers' behaviour affecting residents indirectly). Conclusion: The data showed that almost half of residents' comments described 'person' role characteristics. There was a significant shift in the role ranked second, from the physician role in 1994 to the supervisor role in 2003. The findings highlighted that teachers, in order to be perceived as ideal, should adapt their behaviour to residents' learning needs. © 2008 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.