Coventry University: E-Journals
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Conflict in Practice-based Settings: Nature, Resolution and Education
Get PDFIn this masterclass we review the evidence regarding the nature of conflict within healthcare practice settings, discuss ways of preventing and resolving conflict, and consider how practice-based education, focusing on conflict and negotiation, may help learners achieve positive outcomes. Conflict is a serious state, which is often prolonged and arises from incompatibility or divergent interests and values. However, conflict may also be used as a productive force for change. Conflict has been included as a core competence for healthcare professionals in a number of competency frameworks because of the recognition that inter- and intra-professional conflict affect patient safety and outcomes, as well as having detrimental effects on staff morale, and on physical and mental health. We discuss how conflict may arise from several triggers – personal, professional and organisational. In particular, disparities in values may lead to conflict, while good communication is fundamental to optimal practice. The history of the development of the health professions includes many examples of conflict between professional groups. A healthy practice environment should encourage constructive conflict management, recognising that conflict will always arise. Early experiences of working and learning together represent important learning opportunities for students, enabling the development and practice of teamwork skills, as well as helping them to recognise and understand the different values, perspectives, roles and responsibilities of team members. Learning opportunities based on real-life scenarios and patient experiences provide a focus common to all professional groups, allowing students the opportunity to explore their differences and similarities. The key messages are: conflict occurs frequently in practice-based settings both inter- and intra-professionally, and learners need to be able to recognise and deal with conflict, including through negotiation
Student Voices Following Fieldwork Failure: A Phenomenological Inquiry
Get PDFClinical education, or fieldwork, is a required part of learning in many healthcare professions. Successful fieldwork indicates readiness for practice. Failure during clinical education has seldom been examined from the viewpoint of the student. The purpose of the study is to investigate adaptive strategies following fieldwork failure of occupational therapy students in the United States, to understand the meaning associated with the experience, and contribute to professional clinical education. This phenomenological study examines failure with an Occupational Adaptation perspective. Data are collected through open-ended, semi-structured interviews. Twelve occupational therapy students reveal a broad range of adaptive behaviours, strategies and categories without a predominant pattern. Three themes emerge: I need to tell my story not passing is not the same as failing, and convergence, supporting the concept of learning from what goes wrong. When academic or clinical education challenges are greater than a student’s ability to adapt, he or she may fail. The investigator recommends the inclusion of student voices for research in teaching and learning about failure. Future research could apply the Occupational Adaptation theoretical frame of reference to name and frame adaptive strategies in clinical education and intervention across professions and cultures that support professional growth
Research Article Titles and Disciplinary Conventions: A Corpus Study of Eight Disciplines
Get PDFResearch articles are clearly influenced by the discipline of the research being reported. Just as disciplinary conventions place constraints on, for example, the moves and language use of abstracts and introductions, they also provide a set of options for title design. This study attempts to identify the title conventions of eight disciplines by focusing on various features that play a part in title design: the use of multiple-unit titles (those with subtitles); the use of noun phrases to form the title; and ’a’ or ’the’ in initial position. The length of titles is investigated, as is the proportion of substantive words. Data is based on a 3,200-title corpus of titles from research articles published in prestigious journals in four disciplines in the hard sciences (botany, fluid engineering, geology, and medicine) and four in the soft sciences (economics, education, history, and sociology). The data is presented in a visual form that compares title features by discipline, to demonstrate title conventions and to help novice writers understand the features and options available
Editorial: EATAW 2013: Teaching Writing across Languages and Cultures - The Wealth of Diversity in European Contexts
Get PDFDevising an Online Resource to Help Undergraduate Science Students Critically Evaluate Research Articles
Get PDFCritically evaluating research papers is an important vehicle for promoting acculturation into a scientific discipline. As science students progress through their undergraduate studies, their critical abilities are expected to become heightened, and research papers are read and cited in order to support a variety of assignments, such as essays, critical reviews and presentations, progressing to shaping laboratory research projects and dissertation-writing. This article describes the process of designing a modular online resource. The resource is aimed at familiarising students with the structural conventions and argumentative devices used in research papers and supporting them in deep-reading a research paper in life sciences or chemistry. The modules employ audio- and video-recorded extracts from interviews with a key author to provide a context for the origins, motivations and processes behind the writing of a specific paper, plus scaffolded questions to encourage critical evaluation of the paper. Notable features of the project were the employment of a multi-disciplinary team of staff and research postgraduates coupled with the developmental testing of the resource by undergraduates. Lessons learnt from the project are considered, including the resource’s integration within the curriculum and the challenges of writing such interactive resources for different disciplines
Do context and emotional reaction to physical dating violence interact to increase the likelihood of disclosure in 13 year-old British adolescents?
Get PDFThe present study examines the contextual antecedent correlates and consequences of adolescents’ involvement in dating violence and their role as correlates of disclosure in a sample of 3604, 13 year-old adolescents (1838, 51.6% female; 91% White) from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). Of the sample, 322 (10.5%) reported using violence and 382 (11.7%) reported experiencing violence in romantic relationships, with males more likely to identify themselves as victims, and girls more likely to be perpetrators and perpetrator/victims. Girls however, were more likely to disclose their experiences. Males were more likely to be victimized due to anger and jealousy and perpetration was explained as being part of a game or done in self defense. For females victimization was experienced in the context of a game and perpetration was initiated due to anger or responding to being annoyed by their partners. Associations were found for each gender in relation to the context of the violence and the resulting emotional response to the experience. These findings need to be considered in relation to what educational strategies may be required in order to ensure that adolescents can enjoy healthy dating relationships
Developing Student-Writers’ Self-efficacy Beliefs
Get PDFBased on Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura 1986) research in academic writing and self-efficacy has shown that there is a relationship between students’ performance and their belief in their writing abilities (Matoti and Shumba 2011, Shah et al. 2011, Prat-Sala and Redford 2012). Using questionnaires, interviews and an assessed written task, this study seeks to contribute to this research by exploring the relationship between writing proficiency and self-efficacy beliefs of undergraduate students taking an Advanced Writing Skills course. The aims of the study were to find out a) what the writing proficiency self-ratings of students doing the Advanced Writing Skills course are like b) their writing self-efficacy beliefs c) what they perceive to be problems related to their writing skills and d) whether there is any relationship between performance level of the students and their self-efficacy beliefs. An analysis of the results reveals that although students’ self-rating was high, their efficacy beliefs were moderate. The results of the present study also reveal that there was no relationship between students’ essay writing performance and their self-efficacy beliefs in the context of this study. This article argues that although self-efficacy beliefs need not be high for students to be motivated to perform better, boosting these beliefs can add to students’ tools for developing their writing competence
Peer Feedback in Disciplinary Writing for Publication in English: The Case of ‘Rolli’, a German-L1 Novice Scholar
Get PDFAchieving publication in Anglophone science journals is a goal of many multilingual scholars, and failure can have huge implications for individuals’ future careers and for the global dissemination of scientific knowledge. Despite the importance of the topic, there is still a lack of bottom-up research, which investigates the experience of writing for publication in English from the perspective of the novice scholar. This article presents the case of ‘Rolli’, a German-L1 novice scholar facing the challenge of writing his first article for publication as the lead author and writing it moreover in English. The study uses text history, interviews, and feedback comments to portray the socially-situated story of a novice multilingual writer on a trajectory to successful publication. The case shows how peer feedback was pivotal in achieving publication. Rolli’s ability to respond to this feedback was a key success factor in the writing for publication process. The case sheds light on the importance of peer feedback in disciplinary writing
Developing a German-English Dictionary of the Common Language of Academia
Get PDFThe factual dominance of English as Lingua Franca of the international scientific community continues to increase in most disciplines. Univesrity students, lecturers and researchers are more and more commonly required to acquire English for academic purposes. Meanwhile, linguistic research into the similarities and differences between academic English and its German, Italian or other counterparts has been conducted. However, no comprehensive study has yet dealt with the specific problems faced by German-speaking academics and students acquiring English for academic purposes. It is in this context that this article presents an ongoing research project designed to address that gap. It concerns the lack or partial lack of equivalent linguistic means between the German and the English common language of academia. The common language of academia is, by definition, used across the disciplines and contains or realises fixed, language- and culture-specific conceptions of what actually constitutes 'science' or 'academia'. It is largely based on but differs from language use in everyday contexts, thus posing significant challenges for students even in their first language. In this article, we address the challenge of achieving not only a functional comparison of the common language of academia in English and German, but of complementing the underlying inventory and analysis of each. Following a discussion of previous work, we detail our research design and criteria for the comparative analysis of the common language of academia in English and German, as well as some prelimiary results of the project. The findings of our project will ultimately lead to a German-English dictionary for the common language of academia designed to support both students and academics with understanding and participating in international scientific communities with different linguistic backgrounds.