Insights into Using IT-Based Peer Feedback to Practice the Students Providing Feedback Skill

The skills students need nowadays have changed over the last decades. The required skills are shifting more and more towards higher order thinking skills, such as critical thinking, collaboration and communication. One of the main ways of practicing these skills is through formative feedback, which consists of self-assessment and peer-assessment in our setting. However, today’s lecturers are facing the challenge that the number of students per lecture is continuously increasing, while the available budget is stagnating. Hence, large scale lectures often lack feedback, caused by the scarcity of resources. To overcome this issue, we propose a teaching-learning scenario using IT to provide formative feedback at scale. In this paper, we are focusing on the students’ providing-feedback skill, which is important for collaborative tasks. In our experiment with around 101 master students, we were able to show that the students’ ability to provide feedback significantly improved by participating in IT-based peer feedback iterations

Teaching with infographics: practising new digital competencies and visual literacies

This position paper examines the use of infographics as a teaching assignment in the online college classroom. It argues for the benefits of adopting this type of creative assignment for teaching and learning, and considers the pedagogic and technical challenges that may arise in doing so. Data and insights are drawn from two case studies, both from the communications field, one online class and a blended one, taught at two different institutions. The paper demonstrates how incorporating a research-based graphic design assignment into coursework challenges and encourages students' visual digital literacies. The paper includes practical insights and identifies best practices emerging from the authors' classroom experience with the infographic assignment, and from student feedback. The paper suggests that this kind of creative assignment requires students to practice exactly those digital competencies required to participate in an increasingly visual digital culture

Pharmacy students' perceptions toward peer assessment and its use in teaching patient presentation skills.

Background and purposeConducting peer assessment has been associated with positive learning outcomes in higher education. The primary objective was to evaluate pharmacy students' perceptions of using peer assessment as a pedagogical strategy in learning patient presentation skills. Secondary objectives were to determine helpful factors for providing and/or receiving peer assessment and to compare students' perceptions of peer assessment relative to receiving feedback from teaching assistants (TAs).Educational activity and settingPatient presentation skills were taught to third-year pharmacy students in three sessions (session 1: didactic lecture, session 2: faculty-led patient presentation workshops followed by peer assessment, session 3: one-on-one patient presentations to TAs). An anonymous survey instrument consisting of five-point Likert scale, yes/no, and open-ended questions was administered.FindingsA total of 187 students (98%) completed the survey. Peer assessment was perceived as a useful way to obtain feedback on patient presentations (87%). It facilitated higher level thinking and a self-reflection of students' own patient presentations. Most students felt that they received constructive feedback from peers (82%) that helped them improve their patient presentation skills (72%). However, students were more trusting of TAs' skills in assessing patient presentations (76% versus 93%, p < 0.001). Some students were concerned about the specificity and criticalness of feedback they received from peers.SummaryPeer assessment is a useful pedagogical strategy for providing formative feedback to students in learning patient presentations skills in the classroom setting. Students may benefit from additional training to improve the quality of feedback in peer assessment

Assurance of learning standards and scaling strategies to enable expansion of experiential learning courses in management education

In today’s dynamic globalized business environment, management educators must develop pedagogies that support students to manage and lead in rapidly changing business contexts. An increasing number of institutions use experiential learning as a component of their curriculum to address this challenge. Initially, a response to industry criticism that graduates were unable effectively apply skills needed to be successful, experiential learning has become a baseline expectation in management education programs. Students increasingly expect opportunities to practice and demonstrate competency in the theories they learn in the classroom by applying them in real-world projects. However, expanding such opportunities for students is limited by a unique set of complex administrative challenges inherent in this approach. To expand opportunities for students, institutions must overcome scalability obstacles resulting from the customized nature of the offerings. Business challenges where student teams work with external partners provide a real world learning experience. But they also pose difficulty in applying a standardized approach to assurance of learning. Course content must be redeveloped each time the course is offered, as external projects must be sourced, leading to input and output variation. Advising, monitoring, and assessing students is resource intensive, because at many schools each team is assigned a different business challenge. This article offers a set of assurance of learning standards that institutions can apply to project-based experiential learning courses and posits that greater cross-departmental integration in sourcing projects and better use of technology can increase the efficacy and efficiency of the courses to address the scalability issue.Educatio

Innovative learning in action (ILIA) issue three: Employability, enterprise & entrepreneurship

The theme of the 3rd issue of ILIA is Employability, Enterprise and Entrepreneurship, reflecting the University of Salford’s Learning and Teaching Strategy and our Goal “To produce graduates with the skills, creativity, confidence and adaptability to succeed in the labour market and make a meaningful contribution to society”. The creativity, problem solving and change orientation this implies recognizes Salford’s distinctive strengths in this regard, and provides us with a conceptualization of employability which embraces enterprise and entrepreneurship, manifest in the form of selfemployment, but equally relevant to those working within organizations i.e. to intrapreneurship. The contributions to this edition provide us with examples of excellent practice demonstrating how practitioners at Salford have responded to the challenge of providing a quality learning experience for our students. Consideration of the papers and snapshots reveal how colleagues have embedded employability into teaching and learning and assessment strategies, and into frameworks of student support, in differing and innovative ways, across the institution. As this edition of ILIA goes to print work is underway to develop an Employability Policy and Strategy for the University. Designed to provide a coherent and progressive approach to Employability, Enterprise and Careers Education and Guidance, this Strategy will be able to build on the good practice evident both in this edition of ILIA and across the institution. ILIA therefore has once again provided us with a range of perspectives on a key area of curriculum design and development. It also has provided an opportunity to reflect on practice and student learning, to share experience and hopefully to identify future areas for collaboration

Twelve tips for teaching brief motivational interviewing to medical students

Background: Shifting from paternalistic to patient-centred doctor-patient relationships has seen a growing number of medical programs incorporate brief motivational interviewing training in their curriculum. Some medical educators, however, are unsure of precisely what, when, and how to incorporate such training. Aims: This article provides educators with 12 tips for teaching brief motivational interviewing to medical students, premised on evidence-based pedagogy. Methods: Tips were drawn from the literature and authors’ own experiences. Results: The 12 tips are: (1) Set clear learning objectives, (2) Select experienced educators, (3) Provide theoretical perspectives, (4) Share the evidence base, (5) Outline the “spirit”, principles, and sequence, (6) Show students what it looks like, (7) Give students a scaffold to follow, (8) Provide opportunities for skill practice, (9) Involve clinical students in teaching, (10) Use varied formative and summative assessments, (11) Integrate and maintain, and (12) Reflect and evaluate. Conclusions: We describe what to include and why, and outline when and how to teach the essential components of brief motivational interviewing knowledge and skills in a medical curriculum

Reducing Students' Foreign Language Anxiety in Speaking Class Through Cooperative Learning

One of the challenges in teaching English as a foreign language to students in Indonesia is the existence of Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) that are faced by students at any level of education. FLA has hindered the students in mastering English, especially in Speaking Skill, it is shown by their performances in the class which are too nervous, shy, unwilling to participate and lack of confidence.Gardner and McIntyre,(1987) stated that FLA negatively impacts the quality of learning and is a critical factor in learners' success or failure in learning a foreign language. Based on the aforementioned statements, it means reducing students' language anxiety can enhance their overall learning experience and improve motivation and achievement.Thus, for many years, some researchers have attempted to find the most suitable techniques and methods to help students overcome this problem. Some of which is by providing them a conducive learning environment, the culture of caring and of course, a non-threatening atmosphere in the classroom. For that reason, this paper isintended to propose a technique to reduce the students' anxiety; that is cooperative learning. By using cooperative learning, it is expected that it can overcome this problem, as this technique offers a good language-learning environment in which the process of learning dealing with cooperativeness rather than competitiveness. This is in line with Krashen (1982). He, through his Affective Filter Hypothesis, contends that one of the factors of language acquisition to happen is in a low-filter language-learning environment

Developing the scales on evaluation beliefs of student teachers

The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to investigate the validity and the reliability of a newly developed questionnaire named ‘Teacher Evaluation Beliefs’ (TEB). The framework for developing items was provided by the two models. The first model focuses on Student-Centered and Teacher-Centered beliefs about evaluation while the other centers on five dimensions (what/ who/ when/ why/ how). The validity and reliability of the new instrument was investigated using both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis study (n=446). Overall results indicate that the two-factor structure is more reasonable than the five-factor one. Further research needs additional items about the latent dimensions “what” ”who” ”when” ”why” “how” for each existing factor based on Student-centered and Teacher-centered approaches