Literacy skills of adults with intellectual disability in community-based day programs

A brief narrative description of the journal article, document, or resource. There is limited information available related to the literacy skills of adults with intellectual disabilities. In this project, information was collected about the contexts, current practices, and clients' abilities in literacy in two community-based disability service programs. Individual assessments were undertaken to collect details of the current literacy levels of adults with intellectual disabilities in day program settings. These assessments focused on receptive language, reading at the letter, word and sentence level, writing vocabulary and connected text, and literacy preferences. Audits were also conducted related to the provision of opportunities for clients accessing these services to engage with literacy including environmental print. Structured day program activities were observed to gather information about current literacy teaching and learning. Implications of the research findings and suggestions for provision of literacy education in these settings are discusse

'I never imagined I'd have to teach these children': Providing authentic learning experiences for secondary pre-service teachers in teaching students with special needs

This article describes a collaborative and cross-curricula initiative undertaken in the School of Education at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. The project involved developing an integrated approach to providing professional year pre-service secondary teacher education students with experiences that would assist them to develop their knowledge and skills to teach students with special needs in their classrooms. These experiences were undertaken in the authentic teaching and learning context of a post-school literacy program for young adults with intellectual disabilities. In preliminary interviews pre-service teachers revealed that they lacked experience, knowledge and understanding related to teaching students with special needs, and felt that their teacher education program lacked focus in this field. This project was developed in response to these expressed needs. Through participating in the project, pre-service teachers' knowledge and understanding about working with students with diverse learning needs were developed as they undertook real and purposeful tasks in an authentic context.

Responding to our customers' needs: modifications to assessment in Obstetrics and Gynaecology over 20 years

Background and Objectives: This paper reports on historical changes in assessment culminating in the experience of one discipline with negotiated student feedback that has helped design and modify assessment to cater for the requirements of both students and teachers. The standard of assessment required to pass Obstetrics and Gynaecology in the four year graduate entry program in the School of Medicine at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia has become less formalised and more collaborative. Changes in assessment in this discipline over the last 20 years reflect the development of an understanding of the educational principles associated with adult teaching and learning. Assessment has evolved from being teacher focussed, with questionable reliability, validity, and emphasis on outcomes, to being focussed on learning and the student. Multiplechoice examinations, combined with a collaborative approach to the reliability and validity of questions and answers and a debrief or feedback session have been found to provide an assessment format that is art acceptable measure oflearning for both teachers and students. Changes in assessment reflect a collaborative process between teachers and students based on principles of adult learning and involving negotiated student feedback. Our experience with this form of negotiated outcome for assessment is presented together with suggestions for improvement and is contrasted with assessment methods used in this department over the last 20 years. Change and refinement will continue as medical programs strive to meet the learning needs of students and assessment outcomes that are acceptable to its teachers.

Understanding sociocognitive space of written discourse: Implications for teaching business writing to Chinese students

Confronted with various issues in teaching business writing to Chinese students in New Zealand, this paper sees the need for bridging the gap between genre-based research and teaching in an intercultural context. Specifically, it develops an intercultural reflective model in the light of Bhatia's sociocognitive genre study as well as cross-cultural persuasion. As an important part of the model, New Zealand and Chinese experts' intracultural and intercultural reflections on business writing are solicited and compared and the theoretical implications for teaching and learning business writing are discussed. It has been found, through a case study of analysing English and Chinese business faxes, this model can offer an in-depth understanding about discursive competence across cultures, and provide a link between genre-based theory, teaching practice and professional expertise.

How can experience in clinical and community settings contribute to early medical education? A BEME systematic review

Review date: Review period January 1992-December 2001. Final analysis July 2004-January 2005. Background and review context: There has been no rigorous systematic review of the outcomes of early exposure to clinical and community settings in medical education. Objectives of review: (1) Identify published empirical evidence of the effects of early experience in medical education, analyse it, and synthesize conclusions from it. (2) Identify the strengths and limitations of the research effort to date, and identify objectives for future research. Search strategy: Ovid search of. BEI, ERIC, Medline, CIATAHL and EMBASE Additional electronic searches of: Psychinfo, Timelit, EBM reviews, SIGLE, and the Cochrane databases. Hand-searches of: Medical Education, Medical Teacher, Academic Medicine, Teaching and Learning in Medicine, Advances in Health Sciences Education, Journal of Educational Psychology. Criteria: Definitions: Experience: Authentic (real as opposed to simulated) human contact in a social or clinical context that enhances learning of health, illness and/or disease, and the role of the health professional. Early: What would traditionally have been regarded as the preclinical phase, usually the first 2 years. Inclusions: All empirical studies (verifiable, observational data) of early experience in the basic education of health professionals, whatever their design or methodology, including papers not in English. Evidence from other health care professions that could be applied to medicine was included. Exclusions: Not empirical; not early; post-basic; simulated rather than 'authentic' experience. Data collection: Careful validation of selection processes. Coding by two reviewers onto an extensively modified version of the standard BEME coding sheet. Accumulation into an Access database. Secondary coding and synthesis of an interpretation. Headline results: A total of 73 studies met the selection criteria and yielded 277 educational outcomes; 116 of those outcomes (from 38 studies) were rated strong and important enough to include in a narrative synthesis of results; 76% of those outcomes were from descriptive studies and 24% from comparative studies. Early experience motivated and satisfied students of the health professions and helped them acclimatize to clinical environments, develop professionally, interact with patients with more confidence and less stress, develop self-reflection and appraisal skill, and develop a professional identity. It strengthened their learning and made it more real and relevant to clinical practice. It helped students learn about the structure and function of the healthcare system, and about preventive care and the role of health professionals. It supported the learning of both biomedical and behavioural/social sciences and helped students acquire communication and basic clinical skills. There were outcomes for beneficiaries other than students, including teachers, patients, populations, organizations and specialties. Early experience increased recruitment to primary care/rural medical practice, though mainly in US studies which introduced it for that specific purpose as part of a complex intervention. Conclusions: Early experience helps medical students socialize to their chosen profession. It. helps them acquire a range of subject matter and makes their learning more real and relevant. It has potential benefits for other stakeholders, notably teachers and patients. It can influence career choices.

The role of the learning community in the development of discipline knowledge and generic graduate outcomes

In this paper we describe a study of learning outcomes at a research-intensive Australian university. Three graduate outcome variables (discipline knowledge and skills, communication and problem solving, and ethical and social sensitivity) are analysed separately using OLS regression and comparisons are made of the patterns of unique contributions from four independent variables (the CEQ Good Teaching and Learning Communities Scales, and two new, independent, scales for measuring Teaching and Program Quality). Further comparisons of these patterns are made across the Schools of the university. Results support the view that teaching and program quality are not the only important determinants of students' learning outcomes. It is concluded that, whilst it continues to be appropriate for universities to be concerned with the quality of their teaching and programs, the interactive, social and collaborative aspects of students' learning experiences, captured in the notion of the Learning Community, are also very important determinants of graduate outcomes, and so should be included in the focus of attempts at enhancing the quality of student learning.

Is economic philosophy a subject worth teaching?

Economic philosophy is anything but a part of the mainstream diet in the course of an economics education. Yet there are those – including occasional Nobel prizewinners – who argue that an understanding of economic philosophy is absolutely fundamental to an understanding of economics, of why economists disagree and of why “economic rationalists” are often derided by those from other professional backgrounds. The argument put in this paper is that many social science debates hinge more on the values or social philosophy implicitly involved than on technical matters of economic 'science', and that a nuanced understanding of economics requires that each school of thought be traced back to its foundations in terms of its implicit economic philosophy a prioris.

The judicious utilization of new technologies through authentic learning in higher education: A case study

Though technology holds significant promise for enhanced teaching and learning it is unlikely to meet this promise without a principled approach to course design. There is burgeoning discourse about the use of technological tools and models in higher education, but much of the discussion is fixed upon distance learning or technology based courses. This paper will develop and propose a balanced model for effective teaching and learning for “on campus” higher education, with particular emphasis on the opportunities for revitalisation available through the judicious utilisation of new technologies. It will explore the opportunities available for the creation of more authentic learning environments through the principled design. Finally it will demonstrate with a case study how these have come together enabling the creation of an effective and authentic learning environment for one pre-service teacher education course at the University of Queensland.

A reflexive course for Masters students to understand and plan their own continuing professional development

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is seen as a vital part of a professional engineer’s career, by professional engineering institutions as well as individual engineers. Factors such as ever-changing workforce requirements and rapid technological change have resulted in engineers no longer being able to rely just on the skills they learnt at university or can pick up on the job; they must undergo a structured professional development with clear objectives to develop further professional knowledge, values and skills. This paper presents a course developed for students undertaking a Master of Engineering or Master of Project Management at the University of Queensland. This course was specifically designed to help students plan their continuing professional development, while developing professional skills such as communication, ethical reasoning, critical judgement and the need for sustainable development. The course utilised a work integrated learning pedagogy applied within a formal learning environment, and followed the competency based chartered membership program of Engineers Australia, the peak professional body of engineers in Australia. The course was developed and analysed using an action learning approach. The main research question was “Can extra teaching and learning activities be developed that will simulate workplace learning?” The students continually assessed and reflected upon their current competencies, skills and abilities, and planed for the future attainment of specific competencies which they identified as important to their future careers. Various evaluation methods, including surveys before and after the course, were used to evaluate the action learning intervention. It was found that the assessment developed for the course was one of the most important factors, not only in driving student learning, as is widely accepted, but also in changing the students’ understandings and acceptance of the need for continuous professional development. The students also felt that the knowledge, values and skills they developed would be beneficial for their future careers, as they were developed within the context of their own professional development, rather than to just get through the course. © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education

Investigating Concept Mapping and Stimulated Recall to Reveal Academic Teacher Beliefs and how they are enacted through learning designs for the Web

Increasingly, academic teachers are designing their own web sites to add value to or replace other forms of university teaching. These web sites are tangible and dynamic constructions that represent the teachers thinking and decisions derived from an implicit belief system about teaching and learning. The emphasis of this study is to explore the potential of the research techniques of concept-mapping and stimulated recall to locate the implicit pedagogies of academic teachers and investigate how they are enacted through the learning designs of their web sites. The rationale behind such an investigation is that once these implicit belief systems are made visible, then conversations can commence about how these beliefs are transformed into practice, providing a potent departure point for academic development.

A IMPORTÂNCIA DO PROCESSO COMUNICACIONAL NA GESTÃO DA MODALIDADE EAD ESTUDO DE CASO UNIVERSIDADE METODISTA DE SÃO PAULO

As instituições de ensino superior voltadas para a modalidade a distância, possuem em sua estrutura de gestão alguns mecanismos de comunicação e linguagem. A forma de comunicação online no ensino EAD, deve priorizar a qualidade da recepção e da identificação da mensagem visando atender com sucesso no processo de aprendizagem e melhor interpretação de aspectos culturais dos envolvidos neste processo comunicacional, entre o docente e o discente. Diante do exposto, o objetivo desta pesquisa é encontrar mecanismos para uma melhor comunicação e aprimoramento da linguagem dentro do ambiente virtual de aprendizagem (AVA). Para identificar possíveis tendências de gestão e diante das mudanças da sociedade moderna, as instituições de ensino inseriram a forma de aprendizagem à distância e o EAD foi inserido no cotidiano dos indivíduos com a globalização. A Universidade Metodista, seguindo exemplos de universidades estrangeiras também adotou a educação à distância e seus procedimentos. Ela apresenta em sua gestão inúmeras diferenças na forma de ensino-aprendizagem quando comparada com um curso presencial. Este estudo tem como metodologia a pesquisa qualitativa e como método o estudo de caso. A análise dos dados foi desenvolvida utilizando entrevistas estruturadas. As questões são diretas e abordam o cotidiano dos indivíduos envolvidos. A amostra foi composta de participantes docentes temáticos, auxiliares e discentes, inseridos na modalidade de educação à distância da Universidade Metodista de São Paulo. A unificação do estudo das relações entre discentes e docentes, aliada ao entendimento da forma de comunicação e linguagem no EAD, analisando critérios para a realização de uma gestão traz uma pesquisa com itens relacionados com a educação e formas de aprendizagem no ensino à distância. A pesquisa envolve estudos importantes relacionados com a gestão da educação, linguagem e a comunicação dos indivíduos. Conclui-se com a dissertação, que a comunicação entre os sujeitos pode ficar comprometida se o diálogo não existir com frequência e desta forma compromete o processo comunicacional. (AU)