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

Women, know your limits: Cultural sexism in academia

Despite the considerable advances of the feminist movement across Western societies, in Universities women are less likely to be promoted, or paid as much as their male colleagues, or even get jobs in the first place. One way in which we can start to reflect on why this might be the case is through hearing the experiences of women academics themselves. Using feminist methodology, this article attempts to unpack and explore just some examples of ‘cultural sexism’ which characterise the working lives of many women in British academia.This article uses qualitative methods to describe and make sense of just some of those experiences. In so doing, the argument is also made that the activity of academia is profoundly gendered and this explicit acknowledgement may contribute to our understanding of the under-representation of women in senior positions

Is self-assessment in religious education unique?

This paper addresses the question: is self-assessment in religious education unique? It first presents an overview of some challenges for assessment from subject differences, and then reviews the generic literature on self-assessment. It builds on earlier empirical research on self-assessment in religious education, carried out in an English state secondary school (Fancourt 2010); this was used to propose a variant of self-assessment which is tailored to the demands of religious education – reflexive self-assessment. Its implications for more general understandings of the relationship between subject pedagogy and self-assessment are discussed, especially the recognition of values not only in religious education but in other subjects too, reinforcing the need to develop subject-specific variants of self-assessment that reflect the breadth of learning outcomes

Combinatorial RNA Design: Designability and Structure-Approximating Algorithm

In this work, we consider the Combinatorial RNA Design problem, a minimal instance of the RNA design problem which aims at finding a sequence that admits a given target as its unique base pair maximizing structure. We provide complete characterizations for the structures that can be designed using restricted alphabets. Under a classic four-letter alphabet, we provide a complete characterization of designable structures without unpaired bases. When unpaired bases are allowed, we provide partial characterizations for classes of designable/undesignable structures, and show that the class of designable structures is closed under the stutter operation. Membership of a given structure to any of the classes can be tested in linear time and, for positive instances, a solution can be found in linear time. Finally, we consider a structure-approximating version of the problem that allows to extend bands (helices) and, assuming that the input structure avoids two motifs, we provide a linear-time algorithm that produces a designable structure with at most twice more base pairs than the input structure.Comment: CPM - 26th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, Jun 2015, Ischia Island, Italy. LNCS, 201

When does the action start and finish? Making the case for an ethnographic action research in educational research

This paper explores how ethnographic and action research methodologies can be justifiably combined to create a new methodological approach in educational research. It draws on existing examples in both educational research and development studies that have discussed the use of ethnography and action research in specific projects. Interpretations of ethnography and action research are developed that aim to minimise the epistemological differences between them. The paper also contextualises an ‘ethnographic action research’ approach with reference to an example of the author’s research into participation in three ‘reception’ (first year of schooling) classes in the United Kingdom. It is argued that research into the theme of participation in early years education, using participative methods, was particularly suitable for this new methodological approach

Towards a critical epidemiology approach for applied sexual health research

Critical approaches may benefit epidemiological studies of sexual health. This article proposes a critical approach, reconcilable with social epidemiological enquiry. Key aims of critical epidemiology for sexual health are identified, from which three criticisms of practice emerge: (1) lack of attention to socio-cultural contexts, (2) construction of 'risk' as residing in the individual and (3) enactment of public health agendas which privilege and pathologise certain behaviours. These reflect and construct an apolitical understanding of population health. This article proposes features of a critical epidemiology that represent a morally driven re-envisioning of the focus, analysis and interpretation of epidemiological studies of sexual health

Embodied Knowledge: Writing Researchers’ Bodies Into Qualitative Health Research

After more than a decade of postpositivist health care research and an increase in narrative writing practices, social scientific, qualitative health research remains largely disembodied. The erasure of researchers’ bodies from conventional accounts of research obscures the complexities of knowledge production and yields deceptively tidy accounts of research. Qualitative health research could benefit significantly from embodied writing that explores the discursive relationship between the body and the self and the semantic challenges of writing the body by incorporating bodily details and experiences into research accounts. Researchers can represent their bodies by incorporating autoethnographic narratives, drawing on all of their senses, interrogating the connections between their bodily signifiers and research processes, and experimenting with the semantics of self and body. The author illustrates opportunities for embodiment with excerpts from an ethnography of a geriatric oncology team and explores implications of embodied writing for the practice of qualitative health research

Research findings from the Memories of Nursing oral history project.

Capturing the stories of nurses who practised in the past offers the opportunity to reflect on the changes in practice over time to determine lessons for the future. This article shares some of the memories of a group of 16 nurses who were interviewed in Bournemouth, UK, between 2009 and 2016. Thematic analysis of the interview transcripts identified a number of themes, three of which are presented: defining moments, hygiene and hierarchy. The similarities and differences between their experiences and contemporary nursing practice are discussed to highlight how it may be timely to think back in order to take practice forward positively in the future