Assessment of simulated clinical skills and distance students: can we do it better?

Australian universities have traditionally been able to supplement clinical education, for undergraduate nursing courses, delivered on placement with weekly clinical teaching in the simulated environment. The Objective Structured Clinical Assessment (OSCA) tool has been used in this simulated environment to assess clinical skills. Recently, however, online delivery of undergraduate nursing courses has become more common. The move from an internal mode of teaching to an online external mode is seen worldwide and poses challenges to staff and students as well as changing the teaching and learning culture of institutions (Philip and Wozniak, 2009). This cultural shift and the resulting diminishing timeframe for students to acquire and practice simulated clinical skills imply that it may become necessary to rethink assessment forms such as the OSCA assessment. This study examines whether or not the OSCA tool developed by Bujack et al. (1991a) is the best tool to be used in this new context, where online teaching is supplemented by very short, annual, intensive periods of study. Skills acquisition theories dictate that time is required to produce an ideal skills acquisition environment (Quinn, 2000) but the time constraints placed on students in such intensive periods of study could influence skills acquisition. This cross-sectional qualitative study used semi-structured interviews and focus groups to collect data. 65% of the nursing faculty participated in the study. The teaching of the Bachelor of Nursing (BN) occurred on two campuses and staff from both areas participated. This group of nurse academics was employed across the range of academic levels (from lecturer to professor) at the University. Data analysis followed a generic thematic analysis framework. Findings in this study show that there are a variety of attitudes and underpinning beliefs amongst staff in relation to the OSCAs. Doubts were raised in regard to the suitability of the use of the OSCA tool in this setting. It also became apparent during this study that the OSCA tool possibly serves purposes other than an assessment tool.

Is peer assessment of asynchronous group discussions fostering skills relevant to our future graduates?

The increasing use of peer assessment in higher education institutions, as well as its benefits in term of students' learning is well documented. Distance education can be fraught with challenges, but creating a community of practice has been proven to increase student engagement and learning. This paper reports on the implementation of peer assessment of online asynchronous group discussions to foster a community of practice and equip future graduates with lifelong skills relevant to their chosen professional path. Through a careful preparation of students, the implementation of the peer assessment process proved beneficial. This paper describes the analysis performed to establish the validity and reliability of the peer assessment process in the context of a 3rd year unit of study of the bachelor of nursing at Charles Darwin University. © 2010 Stéphane Bouchoucha & Helen Wozniak.

A framework for managing learning teams in engineering

BACKGROUND: Team learning is an integral part of engineering education today and teamwork knowledge, teamwork skills and teamwork product have been included as one of the major components of engineering graduate outcomes in undergraduate engineering course/program curriculum. In spite of enormous research advances in theoretical aspects of learning and working in teams, anecdotal evidence suggests that most engineering academic staff are inundated by student complaints of not being able to work in a learning team due to numerous reasons. In addition to student complaints, most engineering academic staff are non-expert in team learning theories and methodologies and hence are unsure of specific learning outcomes of a teamwork, approaches to achieve those learning outcomes, suitability of team learning in a particular unit/subject, planning required for implementing teamwork, implementation and monitoring teamwork and teamwork reflection. Too often engineering academic staff include teamwork, yet without adequate preparation and with little understanding about how to use their time to achieve the greatest gains for themselves or for their students. Hence, there is a clear need for a framework for managing learning teams in engineering units.
PURPOSE OR GOAL: This study develops a framework for managing learning teams in engineering units through extensive review of existing literature and anecdotal practices. The focus is to provide step-by-step procedure so that the problems of team learning in engineering can be reduced. Depending upon the time and resources available to academic staff, the framework would help to choose an optimal path and associated strategies.
APPROACH: This study uses evidence-based literature knowledge to develop a framework that help to manage engineering students’ learning teams. The literature information are discussed in reference to anecdotal practices from undergraduate engineering classrooms.
DISCUSSION: The literature review suggests that for better management of learning teams, engineering academic staff need to focus on specifying learning outcomes of a teamwork, identifying appropriate approaches to achieve these learning outcomes, judging the suitability of team learning in a particular learning context, developing a clear plan for implementing teamwork, implementing and monitoring teamwork and reflecting and re-evaluating teamwork. Elaborated discussions regarding these issues can help academic staff to manage learning teams effectively and efficiently.
RECOMMENDATIONS/IMPLICATIONS/CONCLUSION: Depending upon the availability of time and resources and the suitability of a particular educational context, managing engineering learning teams can be both simple as well as complex. The developed framework may assist engineering academic staff to manage teamwork in their engineering units. For further research, the framework need to implemented, monitored, evaluated and revised.

Design of learning spaces for engineering education

BACKGROUND OR CONTEXT: With the re-imagining of engineering education at Deakin University an opportunity was presented with the ability to design purpose built spaces. With this development a review of leading practice educational spaces was undertaken specifically in a product development unit as well as a materials unit. Whilst both areas have different needs there were some common elements with the location of teaching aids, apparatus and experimental set-up and collaborative teaching spaces.
PURPOSE OR GOAL: This study examined what would a best practice learning environment look like in two different disciplines and what is the connection and similarities in a problem based learning environment. A benchmarking study and literature review on best practice was undertaken; this learning space was intrinsically linked to the educational model. Aspects of the educational model have started to be implemented in this long term project
APPROACH: Student perceptions were measured primarily through standard unit feedback for both units as well as student comments on the units. Engagement of students was the primary focus of the redesign of purpose built spaces as well as curriculum review. By placing students into specifically designed spaces to enhance learning outcomes it is anticipated that the knowledge and skills attainment will be higher for all students.
DISCUSSION: The redevelopment of learning spaces has forced staff to think hard about their units and how space impacts on student educations. With both the materials and product development units, student had the ability to move through spaces depending on what they were doing. This ability to move is a combination of the educational model, the facilities and staff/student interaction.
RECOMMENDATIONS/IMPLICATIONS/CONCLUSION: While part of a long term redevelopment of facilities and curriculum, it has been found that when the facilities match the educational model student engagement is higher. This has been support in both the literature and observation through student and staff evaluations of the unit. It is expected that as students adapt to the new educational model further they will make greater use of the purpose built facilities.

Insights into casual relief teaching: casual relief teachers’ perceptions of their knowledge and skills

Research into the experiences of casual relief teachers (CRTs)(substitute or supply teachers) across Australia and internationallyhas reported feelings of marginalisation among participants. Thesefindings are concerning when one considers that students mightbe in the care of CRTs for an equivalent of 1 year or morethroughout their schooling. When CRTs describe such feelingsthere is a suggestion that they do not feel a part of the communityof practice in which they work. Accordingly, their opportunities forprofessional learning are often compromised, which has implicationsfor their ability to maintain pedagogical knowledge andskills. This study used cluster sampling survey data to offer insightsinto professional challenges faced by CRTs. The discussion examinesthe self-determined skills of 59 Australian CRTs and the wayschooling is organised that may leave them feeling excludedrather than members of what should be their “communities ofpractice.”

Good practice guidelines for curriculum, supervision and assessment of final year engineering projects and AQF8 learning outcomes

Undergraduate engineering programs require final year students to complete capstone final year projects and demonstrate that they can integrate knowledge, skills and professional graduate attributes developed during the program at Australian Qualification Framework, level 8 (AQF8) outcomes. Literature shows that currently there is no guarantee of consistency for curriculum, supervision and assessment practices of FYEPs. Practices differ greatly between universities and littlework has been initiated that seeks to identify good practice, highlighting the need for the development of guidelines for curriculum, supervision and assessment of FYEPs. This workshop is designed to share and disseminate the good practice guidelines that have been developed on curriculum, supervision and assessment of Final Year Engineering Projects as a part of phase 2 of the project ‘Assessing Final Year Engineering Projects (FYEPs): Ensuring Learning and Teaching Standards and AQF8 Outcomes’ funded by the Australian Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) with people working in the area of FYEPs. The guidelines typically apply to four year undergraduate engineering degrees with embedded Honours and support achievement of AQF8learning outcomes. The project team has 7 partner Universities – Central Queensland University (the lead), University of Technology Sydney, University of Adelaide, Curtin University, Deakin University, University of Tasmania and RMIT University.Participants will be invited to reflect on and evaluate guidelines and findings derived from FYEP coordinators, supervisors and the wider literature and to consider the ways in which these findings might lead to improvements in their practice.

A research agenda for design-based learning in engineering education

It is often argued that ‘design’ is an (perhaps the) essential characteristic of engineering practice; that, “Design requires unique knowledge, skills, and attitudes common to all engineering disciplines, and it is these attributes that distinguish engineering as a profession.” Hence, it is not surprising to see engineering design identified as a key element of engineering education. There are a range of pedagogical models described, badged with a range of names, that are suggested as approaches to teaching engineering design, for example: project-based learning, problem-based learning, design-based learning, conceive-design-implement-operate (CDIO), problem-oriented project-based learning, social design based learning and project-oriented, design-based learning. While significant literature on engineering design education generally exists, many authors note open questions regarding optimal pedagogical approaches, and opportunities for further evaluation and research. In this paper we draw on literature about design education and DBL in engineering education, and synthesise themes that present a potential research agenda for those educators involved in DBL in engineering education.A search of the research literature was conducted using terms related to DBL in engineering education, including ‘Engineering Design’, ‘Design Education’, ‘Engineering + Project Based Learning’, ‘Engineering + Problem Based Learning’ and ‘Engineering + Design Based Learning’. The literature thus collected was expanded by inspecting the lists of references in the initially identified literature set for further potentially relevant literature. This process was repeated until no further related literature was identified, and resulted in 124 items. All collected literature was carefully reviewed for explicitly identified suggestions for future research. The authors also considered the literature set as a whole to identify additional research possibilities implied by aspects of DBL practice commonly addressed weakly, or not at all, in the available published research. From the results of this review, a set of themes was synthesised by grouping related research recommendations and possibilities. In the following section the identified research themes are presented and, for each, a summary of the supporting literature is given and a central research question is formulated by the authors.

A trial of e-simulation of sudden patient deterioration (FIRST2ACT WEB) on student learning

BACKGROUND: High-fidelity simulation pedagogy is of increasing importance in health professional education; however, face-to-face simulation programs are resource intensive and impractical to implement across large numbers of students. OBJECTIVES: To investigate undergraduate nursing students' theoretical and applied learning in response to the e-simulation program-FIRST2ACT WEBTM, and explore predictors of virtual clinical performance. DESIGN AND SETTING: Multi-center trial of FIRST2ACT WEBTM accessible to students in five Australian universities and colleges, across 8 campuses. PARTICIPANTS: A population of 489 final-year nursing students in programs of study leading to license to practice. METHODS: Participants proceeded through three phases: (i) pre-simulation-briefing and assessment of clinical knowledge and experience; (ii) e-simulation-three interactive e-simulation clinical scenarios which included video recordings of patients with deteriorating conditions, interactive clinical tasks, pop up responses to tasks, and timed performance; and (iii) post-simulation feedback and evaluation. Descriptive statistics were followed by bivariate analysis to detect any associations, which were further tested using standard regression analysis. RESULTS: Of 409 students who commenced the program (83% response rate), 367 undergraduate nursing students completed the web-based program in its entirety, yielding a completion rate of 89.7%; 38.1% of students achieved passing clinical performance across three scenarios, and the proportion achieving passing clinical knowledge increased from 78.15% pre-simulation to 91.6% post-simulation. Knowledge was the main independent predictor of clinical performance in responding to a virtual deteriorating patient R(2)=0.090, F(7, 352)=4.962, p<0.001. DISCUSSION: The use of web-based technology allows simulation activities to be accessible to a large number of participants and completion rates indicate that 'Net Generation' nursing students were highly engaged with this mode of learning. CONCLUSION: The web-based e-simulation program FIRST2ACTTM effectively enhanced knowledge, virtual clinical performance, and self-assessed knowledge, skills, confidence, and competence in final-year nursing students.

Teachers’ perspectives and practices on social and emotional learning: multiple case study approach

 This thesis has explored how Preparatory teachers in two Victorian primary schools understand and implement social and emotional learning in their classrooms. The findings of this research indicated that the participating teachers paid more attention to children's social skills rather than to their emotional skills. Another important finding was that social and emotional learning has a very limited place within the policies and the curricula of the participating schools.

Reading the map: locating and navigating the academic skills development of pre-service teachers

This article reports on an action research project that was implemented to strengthen preservice teachers’ academic skills and competencies in a Bachelor of Early Childhood Education course. Strategies identified aseffective included mapping assessment tasks to State and National Early Childhood Education Curriculum and Standards Frameworks and Graduate Teacher Standards and against the skills needed to completeassessment tasks. Tools and resources were developed by lecturers to identify students’ existing skill levels and then scaffold the required competencies into course teaching. The critical reflections of lecturers on their professional learning through this process were found to be integral to successful outcomes for students.

Beyond construction…..A cross-disciplinary approach to improved learning and teaching in built environment degrees

More than 3.4 million people die each year from water, sanitation and hygiene-related causes. Lack of access to clean water and sanitation kills those most vulnerable in the third world. Leadership in managing cross-disciplinary teams is required to present economical, viable community-based solutions. This project utilised the skills of undergraduates across different disciplines of construction, project management, engineering, design, and communication, to work alongside industry mentors in a team to design, build and present an innovative, sustainable water sanitation solution for a Bangladesh community. The semester-long project enabled undergraduate students to develop skills in client relationships, teamwork, and communication as well as discipline skills of project management and construction. The real-world problem necessitated a paradigm shift away from discipline-based knowledge transference towards skills for the future. The project utilised approaches such as negotiated curriculum and assessment; self-directed, flexible participation in learning; use of social media as a learning tool and cross-disciplinary teamwork. Results from student surveys and interviews indicate that this project directly enhanced students’ work-readiness skills and recognition of the importance of problem solving using cross-disciplinary understandings. Students reported greater self-confidence for tackling future workplace challenges. The results also illustrate strong levels of student satisfaction with the cross-disciplinary approach and the importance of skills in client relationships. The project and its outcomes have implications for how learning and teaching occurs in built environment disciplines and has the potential to create significant impact on the calibre of future built environment graduates.

Nonparametric discovery and analysis of learning patterns and autism subgroups from therapeutic data

The spectrum nature and heterogeneity within autism spectrum disorders (ASD) pose as a challenge for treatment. Personalisation of syllabus for children with ASD can improve the efficacy of learning by adjusting the number of opportunities and deciding the course of syllabus. We research the data-motivated approach in an attempt to disentangle this heterogeneity for personalisation of syllabus. With the help of technology and a structured syllabus, collecting data while a child with ASD masters the skills is made possible. The performance data collected are, however, growing and contain missing elements based on the pace and the course each child takes while navigating through the syllabus. Bayesian nonparametric methods are known for automatically discovering the number of latent components and their parameters when the model involves higher complexity. We propose a nonparametric Bayesian matrix factorisation model that discovers learning patterns and the way participants associate with them. Our model is built upon the linear Poisson gamma model (LPGM) with an Indian buffet process prior and extended to incorporate data with missing elements. In this paper, for the first time we have presented learning patterns deduced automatically from data mining and machine learning methods using intervention data recorded for over 500 children with ASD. We compare the results with non-negative matrix factorisation and K-means, which being parametric, not only require us to specify the number of learning patterns in advance, but also do not have a principle approach to deal with missing data. The F1 score observed over varying degree of similarity measure (Jaccard Index) suggests that LPGM yields the best outcome. By observing these patterns with additional knowledge regarding the syllabus it may be possible to observe the progress and dynamically modify the syllabus for improved learning.

An analysis of the use of autobiographical narrative for teachers’ intercultural learning

The currency of intercultural education has risen worldwide in response to increased diversity within societies resulting from migration and global lows of populations. As intercultural education becomes a core responsibility of schooling, critical, detailed analysis of pedagogies for teachers’ own intercultural learning is largely absent in education research, in contrast to attention to developing students’ intercultural capabilities and theoretical and policy analyses. In beginning to address this limitation, this article offers a critical, reflexive analysis of our use and the efficacy of using autobiographical narrative for teachers’ intercultural learning. Framing theories include interculturality, autobiographical narratives for teachers’ professional learning, reflexivity, and the effects of silence and silencing in relation to diversity and intercultural relations in schools. Three instances of teacher autobiographical narrative elicited as part of a large-scale, longitudinal study of intercultural education in Australian schools are deconstructed to elucidate their explicit and hidden meanings and effects. The analysis reveals that while autobiographical narrative has productive potential as a strategy for stimulating teacher reflexivity about cultural identities and intercultural relations, it also contains hidden dangers and traps that caution against viewing it as a pedagogical cure-all in the development of teachers’ intercultural knowledge and skills.

Student voice in 'skills for sustainability': a missing component from the demand side of Australian vocational education and training

The implementation of the Green Skills Agreement ratified by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) in 2010 provides the national policy context for this analysis of skills for sustainability. Data from three different but complementary studies provide powerful insight into the attitudes and perceptions of young people who are studying, or are recent graduates of, Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) programs. We argue that the voices of the young people who participate as students are largely absent from analysis and policy-making, despite policy rhetoric about a demand driven Australian tertiary education sector responsive to consumer (student) interest and need. The combination of these three studies contributes to an improved understanding of what these young adults think and are learning with regard to skills for sustainability in their VET courses and in their workplaces. Most notably, these VET students reported that increasingly changes around skills for sustainability are being implemented into both their work roles and their courses of study.

Reading Between the Lines of Teaching and Learning

Some students lack reading skills due to biological or environmental factors. Accordingly, in my role as an educator, I would like to know if Dialogic Reading Strategies can help Spanish speaking caregivers to facilitate an interactive reading routine at home with their child.