Postgraduate students' perceptions of what makes for effective assessment feedback: a case study of a clinical masters course

he purpose of this study was to examine postgraduate students’ perceptions of assessment feedback. Using the Critical Incident Technique, students enrolled on a taught clinical course were asked for their perceptions of effective and ineffective examples of assessment feedback. The data were analysed using thematic analysis and nine themes emerged that capture perceptions associated with feedback content and feedback process. Students perceived effective feedback if it was specific and clear, using positive tone of language. They expressed a preference for feedback that is delivered in a standardised format, reflecting the grades given, individualised, and when the marking criteria is explicit and enables dialogue with the marker. Students perceived feedback to be ineffective when it focused on grammatical errors rather than content, when it was provided by anonymous graders and if it was too personal. Timeliness of feedback was also important to participants. Practical implications and suggestions for future research are highlighted in this paper

Interactive therapeutic music skill-sharing in the West Bank: An evaluation report of project Beit Sahour

Interactive therapeutic music skill-sharing projects are becoming more widespread, yet there exists little research into the areas of trainees’ motivations and transfer of skills, aspects that seem vital if the projects are to achieve their goals of upskilling employees and benefitting clients. Project Beit Sahour (2012 – ongoing) aimed to equip teachers and social workers with skills to run such groups in their workplaces. This paper provides an evaluation of the project that took place in the West Bank in two mainstream schools, with particular emphasis on trainee motivation, training programme quality and subsequent use and embedding of knowledge and skills. In order to evaluate the training programme, a series of questionnaires were devised and administered at specific times during and after training. Reports were also requested from the schools involved to obtain further information regarding the areas of evaluation. The paper offers an overall summary of findings, and makes recommendations regarding future areas of investigation in projects of this natur

Teaching Medical Students About Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): The Design And Development Of An E-Learning Resource.

In this paper, we describe how an e-learning resource on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) for medical students was designed and developed. The aim of the resource was to provide students with essential knowledge and understanding about ADHD prior to their attendance at a classroom teaching session as well as to serve as a revision tool. The paper focuses on the way in which instructional design, educational and multimedia principles were used to inform the development of the resource. It also reports results of a small-scale evaluation of students' satisfaction with the resource and the way in which they believed it impacted knowledge acquisition of ADHD related concepts and principles. In addition, we consider ways in which the resource could be further utilized and evaluated, for example as part of a flipped classroom approach to learning, and whether this would be a useful model to use when teaching other aspects of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Motivation to learn: test of a model in different training contexts

At the centre of this body of research is a model of motivation to learn that expands upon previous studies by (a) conceptualising general and specific motivation to learn as separate constructs and defining them separately from valence, instrumentality, and self-efficacy, (b) extending the literature on the effect of situational variables through integration of training support variables as additional (i.e., trainer and peer support) predictors of training outcomes, and (c) assessing the generalisability of the model in two studies within the educational domain (chapter 4) and three studies in the organisational domain, all of which were conducted in naturally occurring training environments. It was anticipated that the relationship of learning anxiety and achievement motivation with general and specific motivation to learn would be partially mediated by attitudinal variables and that general and specific motivation to learn would have a positive relationship with training outcomes. It was also predicted that training support will contribute to training outcomes, above and beyond general and specific motivation to learn. Taken together, findings provide evidence as to the importance of context and how different results are obtained when applying the same model to different training environments and with different samples of trainees. The unique conceptualisation of motivation to learn enabled an insight into the effect of learning anxiety, demonstrating that this factor matters most in contexts where a link can be explicitly perceived between training and outcomes. Achievement motivation, on the other hand, was unequivocally related to both measures of motivation to learn. Collectively, this body of research suggests that the trainer has a more important role in training success than motivation to learn. This provides the basis for integrating social support factors within the training environment into models of motivation to learn, presenting a systematic approach to investigating the trainer-trainee interface with implications discussed for research and practice