Making personalised short breaks meaningful: a future research agenda to connect academia, policy and practice

Purpose: There is a growing policy impetus to promote carer well-being through the provision of personalised short breaks. However, understanding of what makes for a successful personalised short break is limited. This paper aims to identify key evidence gaps and considers how these could be addressed. Design/methodology/approach: A scoping review mapping the evidence base relevant to respite and short breaks for carers for older people, including those living with dementia, was completed. National and international literature published from 2000 onwards was reviewed. The scoping review focused on well-being outcomes, identified by previous research, as being important to carers. Findings: Most studies investigating the outcomes of short breaks for carers supporting older people focus on traditional day and residential respite care. Although there have been developments in more personalised break options for carers, research exploring their impact is scarce. There is limited knowledge about how these personalised breaks might support carers to realise important outcomes, including carer health and well-being; a life alongside caring; positive caregiving relationships; choices in caring; and satisfaction in caring. Three priority lines of inquiry to shape a future research agenda are identified: understanding what matters – evidencing personalised short break needs and intended outcomes; capturing what matters – outcomes from personalised short breaks; and commissioning, delivering and scaling up personalised short breaks provision to reflect what matters. Originality/value: This paper contributes to the development of an outcome-focused research agenda on personalised short breaks

What does it take to make integrated care work? A ‘cookbook’ for large-scale deployment of coordinated care and telehealth

The Advancing Care Coordination & Telehealth Deployment (ACT) Programme is the first to explore the organisational and structural processes needed to successfully implement care coordination and telehealth (CC&TH) services on a large scale. A number of insights and conclusions were identified by the ACT programme. These will prove useful and valuable in supporting the large-scale deployment of CC&TH. Targeted at populations of chronic patients and elderly people, these insights and conclusions are a useful benchmark for implementing and exchanging best practices across the EU. Examples are: Perceptions between managers, frontline staff and patients do not always match; Organisational structure does influence the views and experiences of patients: a dedicated contact person is considered both important and helpful; Successful patient adherence happens when staff are engaged; There is a willingness by patients to participate in healthcare programmes; Patients overestimate their level of knowledge and adherence behaviour; The responsibility for adherence must be shared between patients and health care providers; Awareness of the adherence concept is an important factor for adherence promotion; The ability to track the use of resources is a useful feature of a stratification strategy, however, current regional case finding tools are difficult to benchmark and evaluate; Data availability and homogeneity are the biggest challenges when evaluating the performance of the programmes

The 4s web-marketing mix model

This paper reviews the criticism on the 4Ps Marketing Mix framework, the most popular tool of traditional marketing management, and categorizes the main objections of using the model as the foundation of physical marketing. It argues that applying the traditional approach, based on the 4Ps paradigm, is also a poor choice in the case of virtual marketing and identifies two main limitations of the framework in online environments: the drastically diminished role of the Ps and the lack of any strategic elements in the model. Next to identifying the critical factors of the Web marketing, the paper argues that the basis for successful E-Commerce is the full integration of the virtual activities into the company’s physical strategy, marketing plan and organisational processes. The four S elements of the Web-Marketing Mix framework present a sound and functional conceptual basis for designing, developing and commercialising Business-to-Consumer online projects. The model was originally developed for educational purposes and has been tested and refined by means of field projects; two of them are presented as case studies in the paper.\ud \u

Mental Representation and the Construction of Conceptual Understanding in Electronics Education

Learning about abstract electronics concepts can be difficult due to the hidden nature of the phenomena of interest. Developing understanding about electronics is therefore challenging because voltage cannot be readily observed; only the outcomes of the behaviour of voltage can be observed. Consequently modelling the phenomena of interest becomes a crucial factor in supporting learners in their development of knowledge and understanding. Visualisation skills have been promoted as important when modelling knowledge in different forms, supporting learners in their development of knowledge and understanding. Current research about electronics education, however, has tended to focus on learners’ misconceptions, experimental methods and interventions focusing on theoretical aspects of knowledge. Perspectives on learners’ actual constructions of knowledge in practice are not common. The aim of this research study, therefore, was to explore the use of external visual representations in support of learning about electronics concepts, within the context of Secondary Design and Technology education. The study adopts a case study approach and uses an interpretative cross-case synthesis methodology to explore a specific case of representation use among one class of Year 10 students. The analytical framework is designed to focus on the translation of and transition between multiple representations, including computer program code, and the representation of phenomena at three levels of representation: observable, symbolic and abstract. Data collection involved the observation of learners engaged with learning activities, documents collected from these activities, individual semi-structured interviews and participant characteristics data collected from course records. The findings show that common processes of learning are accompanied by individual developments in meaning and understanding. Individual understanding was characterised with the creation of four cognitive profiles representing key learner constructs. Understanding about abstract concepts was shown to benefit from representations where concrete referents linked with practical experience. Electronics understanding was also shown to benefit from the explanatory use of program code as a supporting method with which to model and simulate circuit behaviour. The research approach involving the close observation of learners engaging with learning activities was found to provide a greater understanding of learners’ approaches to learning in practice. The outcomes are applied to the practice of teaching electronics and modifications to the research are suggested for future researchers interested in the issues of teaching, learning and concept development in electronics education

‘A double-edged sword. This is powerful but it could be used destructively’: Perspectives of early career education researchers on learning analytics

Learning analytics has been increasingly outlined as a powerful tool for measuring, analysing, and predicting learning experiences and behaviours. The rising use of learning analytics means that many educational researchers now require new ranges of technical analytical skills to contribute to an increasingly data-heavy field. However, it has been argued that educational data scientists are a ‘scarce breed’ (Buckingham Shum et al., 2013) and that more resources are needed to support the next generation of early career researchers in the education field. At the same time, little is known about how early career education researchers feel towards learning analytics and whether it is important to their current and future research practices. Using a thematic analysis of a participatory learning analytics workshop discussions with 25 early career education researchers, we outline in this article their ambitions, challenges and anxieties towards learning analytics. In doing so, we have provided a roadmap for how the learning analytics field might evolve and practical implications for supporting early career researchers’ development

Supporting Grocery Shopping to Achieve a Healthy and Sustainable Diet – How Developing a Behavioural Theory Informs Dynamic Smartphone Applications

Health and sustainability are becoming increasingly important in current lifestyles. In this context healthy and sustainable grocery shopping is one key aspect to facilitate a balanced and environmentally friendly diet. Many people are interested in changing their habits to become healthier and to consider their impact on the environment through the choices they make. But many do not consider where a healthy and sustainable diet starts. In other words, people frequently have a vague idea that grocery shopping is an important aspect of a healthy and sustainable lifestyle, but they lack sufficient knowledge and action plans to act accordingly. Therefore, the observable behaviour in many cases shows what is called the intention-action/behaviour gap, the attitude-behaviour gap, or the knowing-doing gap (Ajzen, 2016; Grunert, 2011; Hoek, Pearson, James, Lawrence, & Friel, 2017; de Schutter, 2015; Bailey & Harper, 2015). To break this deadlock people, who are interested in such a lifestyle change, need the required information and support to create appropriate action plans to lead them through their grocery shopping without incurring excessive cognitive impact. The risk of such cognitive strain is that people give up easily on their good intentions and fall back into old unhealthy or environmentally impacting habits. Smartphones are ubiquitous and therefore could potentially solve many of these problems, but the design of suitable applications is mostly ad-hoc and not based on thorough modelling. On the other hand, existing behavioural models are considered to be too static and not up to the task of dynamically assessing and influencing behaviour as would be required by a smartphone-based intervention (Riley, et al., 2011; Spruijt-Metz & Nilsen, 2014). To address these problems this work proposes three major contributions: first, a novel comprehensive model of behaviour built on well-established theories used in psychology and the social science. The novelty is the consistent integration of well-proven pre-existing theories into one single comprehensive model that aims to capture the benefits and tries to overcome the limitations of each base theory. Based on this model, the second contribution of this work is the evaluation of motivation and intention to buy healthy and sustainable groceries. It has been found that health is more important than sustainability in this regard, and that health-related goals are easier to act on than sustainability related goals resulting in a bigger intention-action gap for sustainable grocery shopping. To address these issues, the third major contribution of this work is a model-derived design framework for smartphone-based interventions that provides comprehensive guidelines for developing applications to assess and support a specific behaviour, such as grocery shopping, while at the same time aiming at addressing a superordinate issue, such as health and sustainability