A review of the APC and CPD requirements of five built environment professional bodies

Built environment higher education is significantly concerned with education for the professions. This is reflected in the substantial number of professionally accredited built environment degree courses and by the fact that degree course study underpins a significant route to membership of many professional institutions. This working paper reviews the entry requirements – the assessment of professional competence (APC) - and the continuous professional development (CPD) requirements of five built environment professional institutions. The five professional institutions included within this review are: § Association of Building Engineers (ABE); § Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB); § Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA); § Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS); and § Royal Town Planners Institute (RTPI). These Professional Institutions accredit a significant number of Built Environment courses and are all members of the Construction Industry Council (CIC). The review provides a consolidated source of reference for tutors, higher education applicants, students and graduates of accredited built environment courses, novice professionals working towards professional membership and current professional body members undertaking CPD activities

Learning with worked-out problems in Manufacturing Technology: The effects of instructional explanations and self-explanation prompts on acquired knowledge acquisition, near and far transfer performance

In the present research, two different explanatory approaches – namely, instructional explanation and self-explanation prompts – were applied in worked-out-problem-based learning (learning with worked-out problems) in a computer-assisted instructional environment in the domain of manufacturing technology. This research aims at comparing the effects of both explanatory approaches on topic knowledge acquisition, near transfer performance, and far transfer performance. Additionally, this research also attempts to examine the impact of topic interest on the aforementioned variables, in addition to the relationships between topic interest, mental effort, and learning outcomes. A total of 76 second-year students were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The pre- and post-tests were used to measure topic knowledge acquisition, near-transfer performance, and far-transfer performance, whereas topic interest and mental effort were measured by means of Topic Interest Questionnaire and NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX) respectively. The analysis outcomes revealed that the self-explanation prompts approach was significantly superior to the instructional-explanation approach in terms of topic knowledge acquisition and near transfer performance. In addition, the results demonstrated that the impact of topic interest was significantly noticeable on far transfer tasks, but not on topic knowledge acquisition and near transfer tasks. On the other hand, the relationship between mental effort investment and test performance was not statistically significant. Finally, an equivocal relationship, which varied depending on the treatment conditions, was discovered between topic interest, mental effort, and test performance. (DIPF/orig.)In der vorliegenden Untersuchung wurden zwei unterschiedliche Lehrmethoden – instruktionale Erklärung und Aufforderung zur Selbsterklärung – angewandt auf das Lernen mit Lösungsbeispielen in einer computergestützten Lernumgebung, die thematisch im Bereich der Fertigungstechnik angesiedelt ist. Die computergestützte Lernumgebung bestand aus einer vom Autor erstellten Lernsoftware, die mit Macromedia Authorware entworfen und entwickelt wurde. Hauptziel der Studie war ein Vergleich der Effekte beider Lehrmethoden auf die Aneignung von Sachwissen sowie die Leistung beim nahen und weiten Transfer. Außerdem wurden die Auswirkungen von Gegenstandsinteresse auf die zuvor genannten Kriterien untersucht und die Beziehungen zwischen Gegenstandsinteresse, mentaler Anstrengung und Lernergebnissen. Insgesamt wurden 76 Studierende im zweiten Jahr ihres Studiums an der Fakultät für Technische Bildung, Universität Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM), nach dem Zufallsprinzip in drei Gruppen aufgeteilt: Selbsterklärungsaufforderung (SE: n = 25), instruktionale Erklärung (IE: n = 25) und Kontrollgruppe (n = 26). Mit Pre- und Post-Tests wurden die Aneignung von Sachwissen sowie die nahe und weite Transferleistung erhoben. Gegenstandsinteresse und mentale Anstrengung wurden mit dem Topic Interest–Fragebogen und dem NASA-TLX gemessen. Das Statistik-Paket für die Sozialwissenschaften (SPSS) wurde verwendet, um die Hypothesen an den gesammelten Daten zu prüfen. Die Hypothesenprüfung erfolgte mittels quantitativ statistischer Auswertungsverfahren (Korrelation, Varianzanalyse). (DIPF/Orig.

Learning to be a Woodturner

National and international Government policies and reports suggest that lifelong learning is a necessity to promote the cultural, social, educational and vocational dimensions of a person’s life. Many community based organisations play a significant role in providing learning opportunities for adults and thus promote a broad lifelong learning agenda. One such organisation is the Woodturners’ Society of Queensland (WSQ). The aim of the WSQ is the dissemination of information to its members (the majority of whom are over 50 years old) pertaining to the craft of woodturning in addition to providing workshops, seminars and training courses that help to develop and enhance their skills of woodturning. Via semi-structured interviews, the research reported in this paper explores the experiences of ten mature aged members of the WSQ with a view to examining not only their motivation to learn woodturning but also, and most importantly, the learning processes and activities they nominated as critical to their growth. Key factors that facilitated and inhibited the learning processes are identified and discussed. The paper concludes with implications that point to the need to support communities of practice

Using language technologies to support individual formative feedback

In modern educational environments for group learning it is often challenging for tutors to provide timely individual formative feedback to learners. Taking the case of undergraduate Medicine, we have found that formative feedback is generally provided to learners on an ad-hoc basis, usually at the group, rather than individual, level. Consequently, conceptual issues for individuals often remain undetected until summative assessment. In many subject domains, learners will typically produce written materials to record their study activities. One way for tutors to diagnose conceptual development issues for an individual learner would be to analyse the contents of the learning materials they produce, which would be a significant undertaking. CONSPECT is one of six core web-based services of the Language Technologies for Lifelong Learning (LTfLL) project. This European Union Framework 7-funded project seeks to make use of Language Technologies to provide semi-automated analysis of the large quantities of text generated by learners through the course of their learning. CONSPECT aims to provide formative feedback and monitoring of learners’ conceptual development. It uses a Natural Language Processing method, based on Latent Semantic Analysis, to compare learner materials to reference models generated from reference or learning materials. This paper provides a summary of the service development alongside results from validation of Version 1.0 of the service

Strategies to improve the quality of initial teacher education for teachers in the education and training sector (further education and skills)

This report details the Inquiring Teachers, Inquiring Learners project which was developed to support partner institutions to develop and apply a culture of action research within their organisation. The underlying principle of the project was professionalism and in particular the promotion and development of teachers’ professional identities and attitudes as the key to the enhancement of student learning, above all, a vision of the ‘inquiring teacher’. Inquiring teachers it is felt are more likely to develop inquiring learners. Teachers are best placed to know about their subjects and their learners’ needs within their local contexts. The project aimed to support partners of the School of Education to develop the skills and knowledge to define and undertake an action research project that would contribute to improving ITE within their context.Education and Training Foundatio

Criteria for the diploma qualifications in science at advanced level: principal learning

"The purpose of this document is to record a full set of criteria for level 3 principal learning qualifications for the Advanced Diploma in science. It also sets out the overall aims of the Diplomas in science." - purpose