Aboriginal girls circle: enhancing connectedness and promoting resilience for Aboriginal girls

This report presents an evaluation of the Aboriginal Girls’ Circle, an intervention targeted to increase social connection, participation and self-confidence amongst Aboriginal girls attending secondary schools. Overview The Aboriginal Girls’ Circle (AGC) is an intervention targeted to increase social connection, participation and self- confidence amongst Aboriginal girls attending secondary schools. Researchers from the University of Western Sydney (UWS)’s School of Education sought to evaluate the AGC pilot undertaken at Dubbo College and to provide recommendations for the program’s further development. The following specific aims were outlined for this pilot research. 1. To determine the effects of the AGC for participants’ resilience, connectedness, self-concept and cultural identity, 2. To investigate and track the development of culturally appropriate tools and methods for measuring these constructs, and 3. To evaluate the relative effectiveness of various components of the program and implementation processes. Ethical protocols for working with Aboriginal communities were an important aspect of the research design, which was approved by the UWS Human Research Ethics Committee and by the by the NSW Department of Education and Communities. The research was undertaken in two stages, beginning with a consultation process that sought the views of community Elders, the AGC program developers and key school-based personnel. The first stage of the research involved field observations of the AGC in action, together with a series of interviews and focus groups involving participants, group leaders, community Elders and school staff. The second stage used quantitative methods to measure the effects of the program on key variables relating to student connectedness, resilience, cultural identity and self-concept

W(h)ither the academy? An exploration of the role of university social work in shaping the future of social work in Europe

A controversial proposal to pilot the training of child protection social workers through an intensive work-based route in England is being supported and funded by the UK Government. Frontline, the brainchild of a former teacher, locates social work training within local authorities (‘the agency’) rather than university social work departments (‘the academy’) and has stimulated debate amongst social work academics about their role in shaping the direction of the profession. As a contribution to this debate, this paper explores the duality of social work education, which derives its knowledge from both the academic social sciences and the experience of practice within social work agencies. While social work education has traditionally been delivered by the academy, this paper also explores whether the delivery of training in the allied professions of probation and nursing by ‘the agency’ is equally effective. Finally, this paper explores the Helsinki model which achieves a synergy of ‘academy’ and ‘agency’. It suggests that there are alternative models of social work education, practice and research which avoid dichotomies between the ‘academy’ and the ‘agency’ and enable the profession to be shaped by both social work academics and practitioners

Transition in, transition out (TiTo): peer mentoring for sustainable development of first and third year psychology students [Final Report]

Transition In, Transition Out (TiTo) is a student peer-mentoring model designed to simultaneously support commencing and graduating students. Outcomes of the project include development of a sustainable, evidence-based approach for managing student transition and an improved student experience. TiTo was developed from a sound pedagogical base, drawing on evidence about transition, learning and graduate attributes relevant to the discipline of psychology. As such TiTo brings together the following three overlapping frameworks to support the transition, engagement, and learning of psychology students: • The Five Senses of Success framework (Lizzio, 2006), which summarise the major predictors of successful transition for first year students; • Entwistle’s (2000) deep, surface and strategic approaches to learning; and • The concept of psychological literacy, which is the capacity to adaptively apply psychological principles to meet personal, professional, and societal needs (Cranney & Dunn, 2011). TiTo involves training final year students as mentors. Training and on-going support for mentors is embedded in a third year capstone course. The mentors work with first year students for eight weeks of the semester, facilitating work on assessment tasks and supporting transition to university. The mentoring package is designed to build positive change for both first year students and their third year mentors in the five senses of success, learning approaches and psychological literacies, thus better preparing students as they enter into the psychology discipline and as they prepare to graduate. In order to evaluate TiTo, we implemented and tested the model in two different university contexts. The first was a large urban university, RMIT University. RMIT has a student cohort of more than 70,000 based on several campuses in urban Melbourne and off-shore. RMIT is part of the Australian Technology Network of Universities (ATN). The second university was the University of Southern Queensland (USQ), a smaller regional provider, with approximately 25,000 students spread across three campuses in the south-east of Queensland. USQ has a particular expertise in online delivery, with more than 75% of students studying off-campus. USQ is part of the Regional Universities Network (RUN). The evaluation of TiTo undertaken for this project demonstrated the effectiveness of the model for both face-to-face delivery at RMIT University and in blended learning contexts at USQ. First year mentees and third year mentors at both universities rated their experience of mentoring as positive, with the majority of students in each group noting the experience had supported their work on assessment tasks and encouraged a sense of belonging. TiTo was also associated with improvements in aspects associated with success (senses of success) for first year students and mentors as well as positive change in deep, strategic and surface learning over the course of the semester. Increases in psychology literacy were noted for first year students and mentors at both universities. Data collected through focus groups support the value of this initiative. Not all first year students, however, found TiTo useful. Student feedback provides insight into who these students might be and how to better engage them in the process in subsequent iteration of the TiTo model. Key deliverables of the current project can be considered in three broad categories. • A set of resources and materials on peer mentoring. This includes the TiTo website, workbooks for both mentees and mentors, and a mentor training program. • Dissemination of findings through academic and scholarly publications, workshops, and conference presentations. • The creation of a community of stakeholders in the psychology higher education sector who are engaged to act on the project outcomes. The outcomes and deliverables of the project can be found in a range of publications as well as on the project website: <http://emedia.rmit.edu.au/tito/

A new framework for the design and evaluation of a learning institution’s student engagement activities

In this article we explore the potential for attempts to encourage student engagement to be conceptualised as behaviour change activity, and specifically whether a new framework to guide such activity has potential value for the Higher Education (HE) sector. The Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW) (Michie, Susan, Maartje M van Stralen, and Robert West. 2011. “The Behaviour Change Wheel: A New Method for Characterising and Designing Behaviour Change Interventions.” Implementation Science : IS 6 (1): 42. doi:10.1186/1748-5908-6-42) is a framework for the systematic design and development of behaviour change interventions. It has yet to be applied to the domain of student engagement. This article explores its potential, by assessing whether the BCW comprehensively aligns with the state of student engagement as currently presented in the HE literature. This work achieves two things. It firstly allows a prima facie assessment of whether student engagement activity can be readily aligned with the BCW framework. It also highlights omissions and prevalence of activity types in the HE sector, compared with other sectors where behaviour change practice is being successfully applied

Explicating the role of partnerships in changing the health and well-being of local communities in urban regeneration areas: evaluation of the Warnwarth conceptual framework for partnership evaluation

This literature review is one of three outputs from a project: Explicating the role of partnerships in changing the health and well-being of local communities, one of a number of projects in a larger Higher Education Funding Council Strategic Development Fund project (HEFCE) entitled: Urban Regeneration: Making a Difference. This was a collaborative venture between Manchester Metropolitan University, Northumbria University, University of Salford and University of Central Lancashire. Bradford University was an affiliated partner