Coventry University: E-Journals
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Investigation of the Validity and Reliability of a Placement Quality Survey for Measuring Rural Student Work Integrated Learning Placement Quality
Get PDFThis study assessed the validity and reliability of the Placement Quality Survey (PQS) for measuring rural student clinical placement quality among allied health students attending rural placements. Secondly, the association of the PQS with students’ choice of rural placements and rural self-efficacy was determined. Students attending 5–8-week placements completed a paper-based questionnaire and were also invited to complete it again later the same day for reliability testing. Reliability and validity were tested. Analysis of variance was used to investigate relationships between PQS items and composite scores with student discipline, venue of student placement, and rural self-efficacy. Occupational therapy, physiotherapy and speech pathology students (N = 163) participated. From the exploratory factor analysis a single factor was extracted which accounted for 62.1% of the variance. The standard one factor confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated reasonable fit but with the addition of a covariance term provided a good fit. Increased preference for rural placements was demonstrated for eight out of nine nine-item PQS items. Rural self-efficacy increased quality ratings, supporting construct validity. The Cronbach’s alpha indicated a high level of internal consistency. All item-to-item correlations indicated a high level of consistency. Test-retest Pearson’s correlations and intraclass correlation coefficients of repeatability indicated the reliability of the scale over time. This study validated the PQS in a sample of rural allied-health students. The results provided support for reliability. The study addresses the critical need for placement quality data to improve allied health students’ experiences and learning outcomes on placements and encourage systematic quality improvement processes
An Exploration of Novice Nursing Student’s Experiences of Mentoring in Practice Placement Settings in the United Kingdom
Get PDFTThis study focuses on the experience of new UK student nurses of being mentored in the workplace (placement) setting. There is only limited nursing literature that focuses on the experience of being mentored, whilst there is significant material that examines the role of the mentor. With half of the course being spent in the placement setting, the role of the mentor is pivotal in supporting the student and their learning. Adopting a qualitative design, data was collected through small-group interviews with a cohort of first-year nursing students. Data analysis followed in the form of standard thematic analysis. The Communities of Practice model developed by Lave & Wenger was applied as a theoretical lens. Two main themes emerged from the analysis process: the process of belonging; and that of developing identity as a learner. Whilst there was consensus with the literature in that it was felt that the mentor had a key role to play in supporting and facilitating learning, the participants also felt that the mentor supported them to settle into the team. Further, it was found that until the learner felt part of the wider placement clinical team, the process of learning may be hindered. An argument is presented advocating better preparation of students for learning in the workplace setting as this will enable them to assimilate better the learning offered by mentors and the wider healthcare team
Technical Writing as Part of Project Management for Engineers: Using a Writing-Process Approach to Teach Disciplinary Writing Requirements
Get PDFThis article focuses on how formative feedback can be used to help engineering students write precise and coherent management summaries that appeal to a mixed audience. Management summaries are especially challenging to master as students must strive for a balance between adhering to scientific standards and being intelligible for a wider non-expert readership. Students of Energy and Environmental Technology at the school of engineering (FHNW) in Switzerland write a total of six technical reports about their project work (mostly in German). By analysing two management summaries, the focus is laid on the lecturers’ approach of relying on formative feedback which supports and accompanies the students’ iterative writing processes. It is shown how in early semesters lecturers provide hands-on guidance, such as suggesting discourse markers or pinpointing vague references to sharpen students’ awareness of the need to write as concisely as possible for mixed audiences
“The Course Was Not Only for the Semester but Also for Life”: Scaffolding Summary Writing for EFL Students Across Academic Disciplines
Get PDFIt can be a challenge for a university teacher to arrange the teaching of written tasks so that weak foreign language students with differing disciplinary backgrounds can develop their written communication skills. The difficulty is to avoid the focus from becoming just language proficiency. In one course at a technical university in Sweden, three written summaries are scaffolded to address such a challenge. The purpose of this teaching practice paper is to show how employing a specific strategy of repetition facilitates the writing skill development in low-level English language multidisciplinary students. The repeated features are the genre of the task, the writing process used and the occurrences of teacher response. They are organised along a specific learning path so as to encourage the students to build on the knowledge gained in each iteration, between tasks and potentially beyond the course. The paper describes the journey the students take writing the three summaries, working on fulfilling criteria concerned with aspects such as content organisation, coherence and cohesion, and limited grammar errors. A brief analysis of excerpts from one case student’s first and third summaries is included. It is suggested that while the scaffolding can remain the same, the material could be replaced to suit other skills and language level needs
The Impact of an Online Cultural Simulation Activity on the Development of Speech Pathology Students’ Cultural Empathy: A Pilot Study: A pilot study
Get PDFDespite the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Australian population, research suggests that speech pathologists do not feel confident when providing services to Cultural and Linguistic Diversity (CALD) clients and would benefit from further education and training in this area. Cultural empathy has been described as a precursor to cultural competence and previous research has demonstrated the positive impact on nursing students’ cultural empathy toward CALD clients following an interactive cultural simulation experience. This study investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of an online cultural simulation activity in developing the cultural empathy of speech pathology students. Students completed an online cultural simulation in their own time, followed by a tutorial debrief. Both the simulation and debrief were considered to comprise the ‘simulation activity’; which was a component of a first-year introduction to clinical practice course. Participants completed a pre-survey and post-survey, containing the Comprehensive Empathy Scale (CES) and demographic questions. Results were analysed using the Wilcoxon Signed Rank test and a Paired Sample t-test, and a power analysis was conducted to direct future studies. Ten students participated and improved an average of 11.3 on the CES (p=0.14). A power analysis revealed that a minimum of 45 participants would be needed in future studies to observe any statistically significant results. The online application of the cultural simulation activity was feasible, and results indicate an improvement in cultural empathy, although the improvement did not reach statistical significance. Implications for future studies are discussed
PSS-STUDY: PSS-Study: An Exploration of Physiotherapy Student-Perceived Stress and the Related Coping Strategies whilst on Placement
No full textEvidence exploring stress and coping strategies amongst physiotherapy students within clinical practice is lacking. The aim of this study is two-fold: to identify common stressors and coping strategies of BSc and MSc UK physiotherapy students on clinical placement; to explore the relationship between these stressors and coping strategies, and demographics of age, gender and year of study. This cross-sectional study recruited a convenience sample. Participants completed a five-part closed questionnaire. Seventy-seven questionnaires were returned. Frequency counts identified common stressors and coping strategies (%). Chi-squared test analysis identified correlations between variables. Odds ratio analysis highlighted strength of associations. Common stressors: lack of practical skills (58.4%); participants’ perceived expectations of required knowledge (57.1%); time demands (55.8%). Common coping strategies: talking to a friend in the same year of study (79.2%); exercise (68.8%). Lack of support from university/clinical staff (p = 0.04), time demands (p = 0.03) were statistically significant stressors in relation to age. Talking to a friend in the year above was a statistically significant coping strategy (p = 0.008) for male students. Talking to a clinical educator/ward staff was a statistically significant coping strategy in relation to year of study (p = 0.035). Certain stressors were experienced more by second-year BSc and second-year MSc cohorts than the third-year BSc cohort. These findings provide awareness of students who potentially require support in managing stress
Replacing Physiotherapy Student Clinical Education Time with Simulation - The Clinical Educators’ Experience
No full textSimulation is being increasingly utilised as replacement for part of the clinical education of physiotherapy students. There are several studies investigating the experience and outcomes for physiotherapy students when using simulation to replace clinical placement time. The aim of this pilot study was to investigate clinical educators’ opinions of the preparedness for clinical placement of physiotherapy students whose first week of a 5 week clinical placement was replaced by a simulation experience, compared to those who completed the full placement in the clinical setting. A mixed methods pilot study was undertaken. Questionnaires were completed by clinical educators who supervised students for 4 weeks after the students had one week of simulation (1+4 week model) or supervised students who had not had simulation and completed a full 5 week placement in the clinical setting (5-week model). Both groups were asked to rate how prepared they perceived the students to be to commence placement. Clinical educators in the 1+4 week model group were interviewed after the placement. The clinical educators reported students were better prepared to commence placement in some areas of practice if they had undertaken a week of simulation compared to the students they had previously supervised who had not had a simulation week. However, these clinical educators reported that students in the 1+4-week model did not reach the expected level of students in the 5-week model when compared after one week on clinical placement
Adapting to a Disciplinary Discourse: A Redesigned Course for MA History Students
Get PDFFor most MA programs, it is common to enroll students with different BA degrees. The MA students who have changed their discipline are required to adopt a new disciplinary discourse and learn to write academic texts in line with appropriate genres and conventions. This study exemplifies an attempt to redesign the academic writing course for MA History programs at the Ural Federal University in order to ease the difficulties faced by students with non-history backgrounds. The essence of the redesign was to enhance the traditional teaching by demonstrating fundamental dissimilarities between history and other disciplines in terms of writing conventions. Teaching academic writing in that manner was supposed to facilitate students with both a history and non-history backgrounds to master the effective conventional writing of history texts. The efficiency of the redesigned course was estimated on the basis of students’ performance and feedback. This teaching practice can be of use for academic writing instructors who seek to help students from different backgrounds develop skills and competences that are necessary for a specific professional community
Supporting Academic Writing and Publication Practice: PhD Students in Engineering and their Supervisors
Get PDFSupporting Academic Writing and Publication Practice: PhD Students in Engineering and their Supervisors
This poster documents the bottom-up efforts leading to the establishment of an academic writing support program for doctoral students at an engineering university in the Czech Republic (CR).
To defend their dissertation, by law Czech doctoral students have to have published their research. Moreover, many faculties require their doctoral students to publish in prestigious English-medium journals, which is a challenge even for the students’ supervisors. Although publication requirements prior to dissertation defence are becoming common in many countries (Kamler and Thompson, 2014; Kelly, 2017), Czech students often face a challenge of writing in the absence of any prior writing support, where insufficient knowledge of English only adds an extra hurdle to the already difficult task of argumentation absent in Czech schooling. CR has a comparatively high number of doctoral students, but also alarmingly high drop-out rates with more than 50% students not finishing their studies (Beneš et al., 2017). In part, this is due to the students’ difficulties to publish (National Training Fund, 2019). This challenge could be addressed with systematic writing development, but Czech educators and dissertation supervisors are not commonly aware of composition being teachable as we learned from our preliminary study on writing support in doctoral programs in several Czech universities (Rosolová & Kasparkova, in press). While supervisors and university leaders tended to see writing development as a responsibility of the students, the doctoral students were calling for systematic support.
We strive to bring attention to the complexity of writing development and introduce a discourse on academic writing that conceives of academic writing as a bundle of analytical and critical thinking skills coupled with knowledge of rhetorical structures and different academic genres. We show how these skills can be taught through a course drawing on the results from a needs analysis survey among engineering doctoral students, the target population for this course (for more information on the survey, see Kasparkova & Rosolová, 2020). In the survey, students expressed a strong interest in a blended-learning format of the course, which we base on a model of a unique academic writing course developed for researchers at the Czech Academy of Sciences, but not common in Czech universities. Our course is work in progress and combines writing development with library modules that frame the whole writing process as a publication journey ranging from library searches, to a selection of a target journal and communication with reviewers. Because we are well aware that a course alone will not trigger a discourse on writing development in Czech higher education, we also plan on involving a broader academic community through workshops for supervisors and a handbook on teaching academic writing and publishing skills for future course instructors.
Colleagues at EATAW 2019 conference commented on the poster sharing their difficulties from the engineering context and for instance suggested a computer game to engage engineers. This resonated with our plan to invite our engineers into the course through a geo-caching game – for more, see Kasparkova & Rosolová (2020).
References
Beneš, J., Kohoutek, J., & Šmídová, M. (2017). Doktorské studium v ČR [Doctoral studies in the CR]. Centre for Higher Education Studies. https://www.csvs.cz/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Doktorandi_final_2018.pdf
Rosolová, K. E., & Kasparkova, A. (in press). How do I cook an Impact Factor article if you do not show me what the ingredients are? Educare. https://ojs.mau.se/index.php/educare
Kamler, B., & Thomson, P. (2014). Helping Doctoral Students Write (2nd edition). Routledge.
Kasparkova, A., & Rosolová, K. (2020). A geo-caching game ‘Meet your Editor’ as a teaser for writing courses. 2020 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm), Kennesaw, GA, USA, 2020, pp. 87-91. https://doi.org/10.1109/ProComm48883.2020.00019
Kelly, F. J. (2017). The idea of the PhD: The doctorate in the twenty-first-century imagination. Routledge.
National Training Fund. (2019). Complex study of doctoral studies at Charles University and recommendations to improve the conditions and results. Report for the Charles University Management. Prague
Analyzing Writing Style and Adapting to a New Writing Culture: A Teaching Practice
Get PDFThis teaching practice presents a classroom exercise completed in a first-year composition class at an English-medium private university in Lithuania. The course typically takes place in the second semester of the year and is required for all first-year students, who are multilingual but completing their university degree in English. The instructor, a US speaker of English who has a background in US composition studies, leads the exercise that consists of a writing style analysis that examines sentence length, word variety, and sentence emphasis, concluding with a discussion of how students can adapt their writing style to meet the needs of a new audience. The exercise aims to help students understand their writing style and what they need to know to adapt their style to fit the academic writing context in the university