Accounting students' expectations and transition experiences of supervised work experience

Political and economic discourses position employability as a responsibility of higher education, which utilise mechanisms such as supervised work experience (SWE) to embed employability into the undergraduate curriculum. However, sparse investigation of students' contextualised experiences of SWE results in little being known about the mechanisms through which students derive employability benefits from SWE. The aim of this study is to examine the impact of students' expectation and conception of workplace learning on their transition into SWE. Analysis of accounting students' experiences reveal two broad conceptions of workplace learning, the differing impacts of which on transition experience are explored using existing learning transfer perspectives. Students displaying the more common 'technical' conception construct SWE as an opportunity to develop technical, knowledge-based expertise and abilities that prioritize product-based or cognitive learning transfer. Students with an 'experiential' conception were found to construct SWE primarily as an experience through which the development of personal skills and abilities beyond technical expertise are prioritized using process-based or socio-cultural learning transfer. Further data analysis suggests that these two learning transfer approaches have differing impacts on students' employability development which may indicate a need for universities to consider how to develop appropriate student expectations of and approaches to SWE and meaningful support for students' SWE transition

Analyzing learning during Peer Instruction dialogues:A resource activation framework

Peer Instruction (PI) is an evidence based pedagogy commonly used in undergraduate physics instruction. When asked questions designed to test conceptual understanding, it has been observed that the proportion of students choosing the correct answer increases following peer discussion; however, relatively little is known about what takes place during these discussions or how they are beneficial to the processes of learning physics [M. C. James and S. Willoughby, Am. J. Phys. 79, 123 (2011)]. In this paper a framework for analyzing PI discussions developed through the lens of the “resources model” [D. Hammer, Am. J. Phys. 64, 1316 (1996); D. Hammer et al., Information Age Publishing (2005)] is proposed. A central hypothesis for this framework is that the dialogue with peers plays a crucial role in activating appropriate cognitive resources, enabling the students to see the problem differently, and therefore to answer the questions correctly. This framework is used to gain greater insights into the PI discussions of first year undergraduate physics students at the University of Edinburgh, UK, which were recorded using Livescribe Smartpens. Analysis of the dialogues revealed three different types of resource activation corresponding to increasing cognitive grain size. These were activation of knowledge elements, activation of linkages between knowledge elements, and activation of control structures (epistemic games and epistemological frames). Three case studies are examined to illustrate the role that peer dialogue plays in the activation of these cognitive resources in a PI session. The implications for pedagogical practice are discussed

The Clemedson Blast Tube

Traumatic brain injuries (TBI) because of detonations have become a significant problem in military medicine. Partly because the use of modern body protection has increased the survival of victims subjected to detonations from landmines or improvised explosive devices. Detonations commonly expose these victims to pressure waves, high speed fragments, and bodily accelerations. The pressure wave itself may result in a mild TBI, commonly referred to as primary blast, while penetration of fragments into the brain and head rotations resulting from body accelerations can lead to more severe forms of TBI. The details of the cellular injury mechanisms of primary blast are still debated and studies are needed to understand the propagation and effects of the pressure waves inside the skull. Laboratory experiments with good control for physical parameters can provide information that is difficult to retrieve from real-life cases of blast injury. This study focused on head kinematics and pressure propagation into the animal brain cavity during simulated blast trauma (part 1) and the behavioral outcome (part 2). The rat blast model presented here produced maximum intracranial pressure increases of 6\ua0bar while minimal pressure drops. Violent head-to-head restraint contact occurred at approximately 1.7\ua0ms after the pressure pulse reached the head; this contact did not produce any high intracranial pressures. Working memory error was not significantly changed between the exposed and controls at 1\ua0week after blast while significantly more reference memory errors at 5\ua0days and 2\ua0weeks following injury compared to sham after blast

Artefacts mediating practices across time and space: sociocultural studies of material conditions for learning and remembering

The theme of this symposium is to explore the material conditions of learning and remembering from a sociocultural perspective. We do this in four different empirical contexts. Learning and remembering are understood as meaning-making processes that are dependent on and co-constituted by mediating tools that enable practices to extend across time and space. Our interests are precisely in what ways the “tools” people employ in these studies mediate activities of learning and remembering, and how they contribute to the organization of collective forms of knowing. We also address how we analyze the specific material features of tools that co-determine the unfolding of the activities