Improving the assessment of transferable skills in chemistry through evaluation of current practice

The development and assessment of transferable skills acquired by students, such as communication and teamwork, within undergraduate degrees is being increas-ingly emphasised. Many instructors have designed and implemented assessment tasks with the aim to provide students with opportunities to acquire and demon-strate these skills. We have now applied our previously published tool to evaluate whether assessment tasks allow students to demonstrate achievement of these transferable skills. The tool allows detailed evaluation of the alignment of any as-sessment item against the claimed set of learning outcomes. We present here two examples in which use of the tool provides evidence for the level of achievement of transferable skills and a further example of use of the tool to inform curricu-lum design and pedagogy, with the goal of increasing achievement of communi-cation and teamwork bench marks. Implications for practice in assessment design for learning are presented

Institutional research into generic skills and graduate attributes constraints and dilemmas /

This paper will identify and explore some of the dilemmas arising from the constraints affecting institutional research in the area of generic skills and graduate attributes. A study currently in progress at Griffith University - the Griffith Graduate Project (Stage 4) - will be used to illustrate these dilemmas. Earlier stages of the Griffith Graduate Project focused on the implementation and articulation of generic skills and abilities in undergraduate degree programs. Stage 4, however, moves outside the University to explore the perceptions of graduates from three Schools and a sample of employers - perceptions of the different contributions of three different learning contexts (university, university work placements, and employment after graduation) to the development of their generic skills and abilities. The design and conduct of the project is based on three main assumptions. The first is that graduates who have the opportunity to experience the workplace environment as a structured component of their undergraduate degrees are better prepared for post-graduation employment and lifelong learning than those who do not. The second is that universities have a responsibility to prepare graduates for the workplace, and that one way they can do this is to develop students' generic skills in a structured way throughout their undergraduate degree programs. The third is that workplace employers, either those engaging students on work placements or those appointing graduates as paid employees, have a responsibility, equal to that of the universities, to enssure that their transition to the workplace is as smooth as it can be and that their learning at work is characterised by continual (and structured) critical reflection. Some of the difficulties encountered by the project team in conducting this research within the various contexts of the major stakeholders (the University, the employers and the graduates) have created some interesting constraints and dilemmas, which will be outlined in this paper

Personal Technologies and the teaching of professional dispositions in Information Technology

The teaching of professional disposition within the IT curriculum has traditionally involved the use of work-integrated learning, cooperative education and careers counselling. Whilst programmes employing these techniques can often present valuable and authentic learning opportunities to students, their coordination can place limitations on their overall scalability. Furthermore, the difficulties of coordination are not only practical, but pedagogical, presenting challenges for effective scaffolded teaching interventions within a highly individualised workplace setting. This paper explores the possibilities of emerging personal technology, and the ways in which such technologies could be harnessed to offer learning opportunities in IT professional practice in a way that affords the authenticity of industrial placement, but which also provides opportunities for scaffolded intervention by teachers. In addition, they also provide a scaleable solution to the organisational problem. The paper details a programme in IT professional development at the University of Bolton and discusses how the technologies pertaining to the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) have been deployed to give access to learning opportunities which afford an authentic and structured engagement with professional practice. In conclusion we argue that such personal technologies are part of an ongoing socio-technical process which is gradually blurring the boundaries between work and learning: a process which in turn is presenting new pedagogical opportunities

Virtual internship as mediatized experience. The educator's training during COVID19 emergency

The work presents the multimodal study on the didactic solutions adopted for virtual internship of the Degree Course ‘Educational Sciences’ at the Giustino Fortunato University in response to the COVID19 emergency. It focuses on how the internship - assumed as an ‘active mediation device’ – has been reshaped in virtual form – i.e., it has been ‘mediatized’ - and set objectives of investigation as: the effect of specific LMS sources, the interactive web seminars taken within the e-tivities structures, on educational skill, such as the professional thinking that is explicit in the design of interventions; the use of iconic means in the simulations of cases and problems. The synthesis of two different types of analysis and documents - verbal interaction-exchanges on webinar transcriptions and iconic mediators used to illustrate the simulated case – shows that: a. if vir- tual internship provides targeted e-tivities on specific skills, it would be useful for building of professional thinking and skills; b. specifically, web seminars - inter- active between mentor and mentee and supported by explanatory means, such as images - can have an effect in the simulation of problematic cases and, in this way, exercise the design skill of intervention