Coventry University: E-Journals
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Applying the ‘Write Short’ Concept in a University Degree Assessment Strategy
Get PDFIt is a remark credited to several great writers: the admission, ‘I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you this long one instead’. Spilling your guts is easy; being concise takes time. Short is harder; content-rich, succinct writing requires supreme skill and considered application. This short paper argues the case that small is beautiful when we think about setting university assignment word counts
Talking Academic Writing: A Conversation Analysis of One-to-One Learning Development Tutorials
Get PDFWithin the Learning Development community there are few professional development opportunities or resources for new entrants to the profession, particularly with regard to conducting individual academic writing tutorials. The current study seeks to address this by analysing the talk of individual academic writing tutorials in order to better understand how tutorials are organised and conducted, how identities and relationships are established and how learning is developed. We analysed the audio recordings of one-to-one academic writing tutorials and used conversation analysis methodology to identify features of effective practice. The analysis revealed an overarching three-part sequential structure to the tutorials and identified several features of effective practice in the middle phase where advice-giving occurs. The key finding was that indirect and complex processes of highlighting problems and arriving at solutions are useful to develop learners’ skills and autonomy. The application of these insights has the potential to contribute to a more evidence-informed reflective community of Learning Development practitioners
Affective Language in Student Peer Reviews: Exploring Data from Three Institutional Contexts
Get PDFAlthough peer review is a common practice in writing classrooms, there are still few studies that analyze written patterns in students’ peer reviews across multiple institutional contexts. Based on a sample of approximately 50,000 peer reviews written by students at the University of South Florida (USF), Malmö University (MAU), and the University of Tartu (UT), this study examines how students formulate criticism and praise, negotiate power relations, and express authority and expertise in reviewing their peers’ writing. The study specifically focuses on features of affective language, including adjectives, expressions of suggestion, boosters and hedges, cognitive verbs, personal pronouns, and adversative transitions. The results show that across all three contexts, the peer reviews contain a blend of foci, including descriptions and evaluations of peer texts, directives or suggestions for revisions, responses to the writer or the text, and indications of reader interpretations. Across all three contexts, peer reviews also contain more positively glossed responses than negatively glossed responses. By contrast, certain features of affective language pattern idiosyncratically in different contexts; these distinctions can be explained variously according to writer experience, nativeness, and institutional context. The findings carry implications for continued research and for instructional guidance for student peer review
Gaps and Overlaps in Supervisory Responsibilities: A Case Study of Bachelor’s and Master’s Students’ Thesis Writing in Two Departments
Get PDFThis article focuses on how supervisors and students perceive their responsibilities at the beginning of the thesis writing process. Students in general do little research writing before beginning their Bachelor’s or Master’s programs and they often find academic writing to be a complicated task, which means that many do not complete their thesis writing within the stipulated time. A survey was conducted at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV) and the Department of Child and Youth Studies (BUV) at Stockholm University, Sweden. In addition to the distribution of responsibility, participants ranked the importance of four issues: the student’s own collected data in the thesis; language, layout, and correct referencing; the thesis as an excellent product; and the student’s development of his or her competence. In general, students and supervisors agreed on the distribution of responsibilities between them and the importance of some of the issues. The opinions were coherent, considering the survey was conducted early in the thesis writing period. It is suggested that future research includes an in-depth investigation of cultural differences between departments
Simulating Troublesome Contexts: How Multiple Roles within Ward-Based Simulations Promote Professional Nursing Competence
Get PDFNursing care is multifaceted and is practised within complex healthcare environments. Although the concept of competence itself is tenuous (Watson et al. 2002), achievement of nursing competencies remains an essential prerequisite for nurse registration in Ireland. The domains of nursing competence are: professional/ethical practice; holistic approaches to care and the integration of knowledge; organization and management of care; personal and professional development; and interpersonal relationships (An Bord Altranais 2005). At a conceptual level, these can be likened, somewhat, to threshold concepts insofar as they represent important transitions of practice and understanding. In this article, we illustrate how a ward-based simulation exercise with evolving scenarios and multiple role performances mimics ‘troublesome contexts’. We find that this exercise successfully promotes both nurse competence and understanding of threshold concepts through the embodiment of multiple identities (e.g. nurse, patient, relative, observer, etc.). Evaluations of this activity amongst a cohort of final year nursing students have consistently identified the transformative nature of this activity, particularly when acting in the ‘patient’ role. In this article, we describe the processes inherent in this simulation exercise and how the multiple layers of complexity are achieved. The very act of performing multiple identities and roles within an evolving complex environment we suggest, results in a consequential, transformed view (Meyer and Land 2003) of values, attitudes and behaviours in addition to enhancing nursing competence. Evidence of this is demonstrated in evaluations of the debriefing exercise undertaken immediately following simulation
Strategies for Ethics Education with Health Profession Students Before, During, and After Placements
Get PDFHealth professionals must practice ethically in order to ensure compassionate and effective client care; function as good interdisciplinary team members; and protect themselves from litigation, and conduct and ethics complaints. Ethics education is a routine inclusion in health profession degrees, but may only be taught in the classroom, divorced from practice. This article argues that students need ethics education before, during, and after practice placements. We suggest that many powerful opportunities for teaching ethics on and after placements are missed or under-utilised. We have reviewed the scant evidence, and the literature more broadly, to identify strategies for teaching ethics before, during, and after placements; and have added strategies drawn from our own experiences as clinical educators. We highlight where interdisciplinary perspectives can be added to ethics education. We conclude that more research is needed into approaches and strategies for teaching ethics in different contexts