Building shared situational awareness in surgery through distributed dialogue

Background Failure to convey time-critical information to team members during surgery diminishes members’ perception of the dynamic information relevant to their task, and compromises shared situational awareness. This research reports the dialog around clinical decisions made by team members in the time-pressured and high-risk context of surgery, and the impact of these communications on shared situational awareness. Methods Fieldwork methods were used to capture the dynamic integration of individual and situational elements in surgery that provided the backdrop for clinical decisions. Nineteen semi structured interviews were performed with 24 participants from anaesthesia, surgery, and nursing in the operating rooms of a large metropolitan hospital in Queensland, Australia. Thematic analysis was used. Results: The domain “coordinating decisions in surgery” was generated from textual data. Within this domain, three themes illustrated the dialog of clinical decisions, i.e., synchronizing and strategizing actions, sharing local knowledge, and planning contingency decisions based on priority. Conclusion Strategies used to convey decisions that enhanced shared situational awareness included the use of “self-talk”, closed-loop communications, and “overhearing” conversations that occurred at the operating table. Behaviours’ that compromised a team’s shared situational awareness included tunnelling and fixating on one aspect of the situation.

Investigating the factors influencing cyclist awareness and behaviour : an on-road study of cyclist situation awareness

Situation awareness, ones understanding of ‘what is going on’, is a critical commodity for road users. Although the concept has received much attention in the driving context, situation awareness in vulnerable road users, such as cyclists, remains unexplored. This paper presents the findings from an exploratory on-road study of cyclist situation awareness, the aim of which was to explore how cyclists develop situation awareness, what their situation awareness comprises, and what the causes of degraded cyclist situation awareness may be. Twenty participants cycled a pre-defined urban on-road study route. A range of data were collected, including verbal protocols, forward scene video and rear video, and a network analysis procedure was used to describe and assess cyclist situation awareness. The analysis produced a number of key findings regarding cyclist situation awareness, including the potential for cyclists’ awareness of other road users to be degraded due to additional situation awareness and decision making requirements that are placed on them in certain road situations. Strategies for improving cyclists’ situation awareness are discussed.

Learner strategy instruction and student uptake of strategies in a Japanese as a foreign language context

The Japanese language is recognised as being more difficult than European languages, needing three times more tuition time to reach comparable levels of proficiency. Encouraging Japanese as a Foreign Language (JFL) students to become aware of, and effectively use, learner strategies is one way to assist them become more controlled, effective learners leading to enhanced language learning. This thesis investigates the development and implementation of a JFL curriculum implemented in a university course for students learning JFL. The curriculum was developed specifically to assist beginner university students with the development of learner strategies appropriate for a JFL reading context. The theoretical underpinning of the study was informed by Educational Criticism (Eisner, 1998), which aims to describe, interpret and evaluate the processes of interaction between the teacher, the learner and the curriculum and the students' learning processes in a tertiary JFL classroom. The study investigated the effect on student learning processes of a JFL reading program that incorporated explicit learner strategy instruction and identified factors that enhanced or impeded the development of learner strategy knowledge. The participants in the study were 29 students enrolled in the course, 10 of whom volunteered to undertake additional tasks, and the two teachers who implemented the curriculum. Data collection involved a number of different strategies to observe the students' participation in the classroom and learning experiences. Learning processes were investigated through TOL protocols, classroom observations, course evaluations, interviews, and learner strategy use measurement instruments (SILL, SILK and SORS) to document student uptake of learner strategies. The design of the study and its applied focus recognised my expertise as a JFL teacher, curriculum writer and researcher, an approach that aligns with the purpose of a Professional Doctorate. Four general thematics, or principles, were identified in this study: „h Explicit learner strategy instruction provides the context for students to develop awareness of learner strategies and take control of their learning; „h Collaborative learning and interaction with teachers offers students the opportunity for shared knowledge construction; „h Reflection offers teachers and students the opportunity to reflect on their own learning style and strategy knowledge, and raises awareness of other available strategies; and „h Diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds have an impact on curriculum implementation and student uptake of learner strategies. The study¡¦s methodological contribution is that it is one of the first in Australia to use Educational Criticism (Eisner, 1998) as a research methodology. The findings contribute to theoretical knowledge in the fields of Applied Linguistics, Second Language Teaching and Learning, Second Language Acquisition and JFL Teaching and Learning by offering new knowledge on the importance of learner strategies in the beginner JFL classroom, the potential of explicit strategy instruction, the value of reflection for both teachers and students, and the important role of the teacher in the process of curriculum implementation. The general principles identified and the findings of this in-depth study of a JFL classroom can be drawn upon to inform other teaching practice situations, and invite practitioners from not just Japanese, but from other language areas and other disciplines, to examine and improve their own practices, and suggest further research questions to pursue this line of enquiry.

Conditions for Successful Reforms : Characteristics of the Organisation and Culture in Chinese Schools in a Global Context

Reforms to the basic education system in China have reflected an increasing awareness of and openness to new ideas from the global education sphere. Many of the concepts involved in the development and implementation of these reforms, including adopting holistic perspectives of student development; decentralising school governance to facilitate local decision-making to address local needs; and, an increased focus on practical, lifelong learning for all involved in schools, have been promoted in research and policies throughout the world. While working within this global context, the system of schooling in China has retained a unique character that is quite different from education in the West. Drawing on an international project on school transformation, this chapter aims to examine how five secondary schools in Chongqing, a municipality in Southwestern China, have harnessed and aligned their resources to provide effective school governance following the curriculum reforms. Furthermore, the chapter will examine the similarities and differences between the organisational structures and cultures of these schools in China and successful schools in Australia, England, Finland, Wales and the United States.

Sustainable development as a meta-context for engineering education

At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, there is unprecedented awareness of the need for a transformation in development, to meet the needs of the present while also preserving the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. However, within engineering, educators still tend to regard such development as an ‘aspect’ of engineering rather than an overarching meta-context, with ad hoc and highly variable references to topics. Furthermore, within a milieu of interpretations there can appear to be conflicting needs for achieving sustainable development, which can be confusing for students and educators alike. Different articulations of sustainable development can create dilemmas around conflicting needs for designers and researchers, at the level of specific designs and (sub-) disciplinary analysis. Hence sustainability issues need to be addressed at a meta-level using a whole of system approach, so that decisions regarding these dilemmas can be made. With this appreciation, and in light of curriculum renewal challenges that also exist in engineering education, this paper considers how educators might take the next step to move from sustainable development being an interesting ‘aspect’ of the curriculum, to sustainable development as a meta-context for curriculum renewal. It is concluded that capacity building for such strategic considerations is critical in engineering education.

Sustainable development as a meta-context for engineering education

At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, there is unprecedented awareness of the need for a transformation in development, to meet the needs of the present while also preserving the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. However, within engineering, educators still tend to regard such development as an ‘aspect’ of engineering rather than an overarching meta-context, with ad hoc and highly variable references to topics. Furthermore, within a milieu of interpretations there can appear to be conflicting needs for achieving sustainable development, which can be confusing for students and educators alike. Different articulations of sustainable development can create dilemmas around conflicting needs for designers and researchers, at the level of specific designs and (sub-) disciplinary analysis. Hence sustainability issues need to be addressed at a meta-level using a whole of system approach, so that decisions regarding these dilemmas can be made. With this appreciation, and in light of curriculum renewal challenges that also exist in engineering education, this paper considers how educators might take the next step to move from sustainable development being an interesting ‘aspect’ of the curriculum, to sustainable development as a meta-context for curriculum renewal. It is concluded that capacity building for such strategic considerations is critical in engineering education.

Active awareness : supporting the intentional disclosure of awareness information in collaborative systems

This thesis opens up the design space for awareness research in CSCW and HCI. By challenging the prevalent understanding of roles in awareness processes and exploring different mechanisms for actively engaging users in the awareness process, this thesis provides a better understanding of the complexity of these processes and suggests practical solutions for designing and implementing systems that support active awareness. Mutual awareness, a prominent research topic in the fields of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) refers to a fundamental aspect of a person’s work: their ability to gain a better understanding of a situation by perceiving and interpreting their co-workers actions. Technologically-mediated awareness, used to support co-workers across distributed settings, distinguishes between the roles of the actor, whose actions are often limited to being the target of an automated data gathering processes, and the receiver, who wants to be made aware of the actors’ actions. This receiver-centric view of awareness, focusing on helping receivers to deal with complex sets of awareness information, stands in stark contrast to our understanding of awareness as social process involving complex interactions between both actors and receivers. It fails to take into account an actors’ intimate understanding of their own activities and the contribution that this subjective understanding could make in providing richer awareness information. In this thesis I challenge the prevalent receiver-centric notion of awareness, and explore the conceptual foundations, design, implementation and evaluation of an alternative active awareness approach by making the following five contributions. Firstly, I identify the limitations of existing awareness research and solicit further evidence to support the notion of active awareness. I analyse ethnographic workplace studies that demonstrate how actors engage in an intricate interplay involving the monitoring of their co-workers progress and displaying aspects of their activities that may be of relevance to others. The examination of a large body of awareness research reveals that while disclosing information is a common practice in face-to-face collaborative settings it has been neglected in implementations of technically mediated awareness. Based on these considerations, I introduce the notion of intentional disclosure to describe the action of users actively and deliberately contributing awareness information. I consider challenges and potential solutions for the design of active awareness. I compare a range of systems, each allowing users to share information about their activities at various levels of detail. I discuss one of the main challenges to active awareness: that disclosing information about activities requires some degree of effort. I discuss various representations of effort in collaborative work. These considerations reveal that there is a trade-off between the richness of awareness information and the effort required to provide this information. I propose a framework for active awareness, aimed to help designers to understand the scope and limitations of different types of intentional disclosure. I draw on the identified richness/effort trade-off to develop two types of intentional disclosure, both of which aim to facilitate the disclosure of information while reducing the effort required to do so. For both of these approaches, direct and indirect disclosure, I delineate how they differ from related approaches and define a set of design criteria that is intended to guide their implementation. I demonstrate how the framework of active awareness can be practically applied by building two proof-of-concept prototypes that implement direct and indirect disclosure respectively. AnyBiff, implementing direct disclosure, allows users to create, share and use shared representations of activities in order to express their current actions and intentions. SphereX, implementing indirect disclosure, represents shared areas of interests or working context, and links sets of activities to these representations. Lastly, I present the results of the qualitative evaluation of the two prototypes and analyse the results with regard to the extent to which they implemented their respective disclosure mechanisms and supported active awareness. Both systems were deployed and tested in real world environments. The results for AnyBiff showed that users developed a wide range of activity representations, some unanticipated, and actively used the system to disclose information. The results further highlighted a number of design considerations relating to the relationship between awareness and communication, and the role of ambiguity. The evaluation of SphereX validated the feasibility of the indirect disclosure approach. However, the study highlighted the challenges of implementing cross-application awareness support and translating the concept to users. The study resulted in design recommendations aimed to improve the implementation of future systems.

Atmosphere : a framework for contextual awareness

This article enhances existing approaches to present-day asynchronous awareness concepts by providing the means to explicitly represent and mediate contextual information. The resulting concept of contextual awareness takes different notions of the term context into account. Following a human-centered approach, the proposed methods serve as mediators for context between persons rather than automatically detecting context. Based on this variant of awareness, the atmosphere framework is introduced to provide mechanisms to deal with the problem of workload in tandem with contextual information. Atmosphere provides a highly tailorable structure and interface to deal with a wide variance of user and organizational requirements. The article closes with the description of a partial implementation of the framework and its evaluation.

Implementing a context-based environmental science unit in the middle years: Teaching and learning at the creek

Engaging middle-school students in science continues to be a challenge in Australian schools. One initiative that has been tried in the senior years but is a more recent development in the middle years is the context-based approach. In this ethnographic study, we researched the teaching and learning transactions that occurred in one 9th grade science class studying a context-based Environmental Science unit that included visits to the local creek for 11 weeks. Data were derived from field notes, audio and video recorded conversations, interviews, student journals and classroom documents with a particular focus on two selected groups of students. This paper presents two assertions that highlight pedagogical approaches that contributed to learning. Firstly, spontaneous teaching episodes created opportunities for in-the-moment questioning by the teacher that led to students’ awareness of environmental issues and the scientific method; secondly, group work using flip cameras afforded opportunities for students to connect the science concepts with the context. Furthermore, students reported positively about the unit and expressed their appreciation for the opportunity to visit the creek frequently. This findings from this study should encourage teachers to take students into the real-world field for valuable teaching and learning experiences that are not available in the formal classroom.

Teaching pragmatics in an EFL context: Implications for coursebook design, teaching and learning

This case study examined the use of global English language teaching coursebooks by five teachers to teach English language use to students in Thailand where English is a foreign language. Despite the complexities of English language use in Thailand, the coursebook and teachers emphasised sets of decontextualised linguistic structures to teach speaking and conversation. The students interpreted and applied the structures in different ways with varied awareness of the effects of their linguistic choices. Teachers were constrained by the coursebook, their understandings of culture, and knowledge of how to teach pragmatics highlighting implications for teacher education and coursebook design.

The effect of gender context on children's social behaviour in a limited resources situation : an observational study

Knowing when to compete and when to cooperate to maximize opportunities for equal access to activities and materials in groups is critical to children's social and cognitive development. The present study examined the individual (gender, social competence) and contextual factors (gender context) that may determine why some children are more successful than others. One hundred and fifty-six children (M age=6.5 years) were divided into 39 groups of four and videotaped while engaged in a task that required them to cooperate in order to view cartoons. Children within all groups were unfamiliar to one another. Groups varied in gender composition (all girls, all boys, or mixed-sex) and social competence (high vs. low). Group composition by gender interaction effects were found. Girls were most successful at gaining viewing time in same-sex groups, and least successful in mixed-sex groups. Conversely, boys were least successful in same-sex groups and most successful in mixed-sex groups. Similar results were also found at the group level of analysis; however, the way in which the resources were distributed differed as a function of group type. Same-sex girl groups were inequitable but efficient whereas same-sex boy groups were more equitable than mixed groups but inefficient compared to same-sex girl groups. Social competence did not influence children's behavior. The findings from the present study highlight the effect of gender context on cooperation and competition and the relevance of adopting an unfamiliar peer paradigm when investigating children's social behavior.