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Combining realist evaluation and transformative evaluation to advance research in palliative care: The case of end of life companionship
No full textBackground:
Palliative care requires innovative methods to understand what works, for whom, in what circumstances and why. Realist evaluation has become one prominent approach due to its preoccupation with building, and testing, causal theories to explain the influence of contextual factors on outcomes. Undertaking realist evaluation is not without challenges and may amplify issues of underrepresentation, disempower those working in palliative care, and produce results with poor ecological validity. Complementary approaches are needed which mitigate these challenges, whilst producing credible findings that advances knowledge.
Purpose:
In this article it is outlined how realist evaluation provides a toolkit to advance research to explain, and empirically test, the complex contours of palliative care. Moreover, it is proposed that transformative evaluation can provide a catalyst to engage and empower those within palliative care, create the opportunity for care transformation, and produce more informed and authentic theories.
Discussion:
Contemporary issues in palliative care pertain to the complexity of palliative care, the insufficiency of experimental designs alone, and the challenges of achieving inclusive research participation. In this article it is argued that theory led, participatory, opportunistic and naturalistic approaches can provide an antidote to the issues in the literature. The combination also mitigates many methodological critiques of the individual approaches, by increasing the transformative potential of realist evaluation, and explanatory potential of transformative evaluation
Chatting and Cheating: Ensuring academic integrity in the era of ChatGPT
Full text linkThe use of artificial intelligence in academia is a hot topic in the education field. ChatGPT is an AI tool that offers a range of benefits, including increased student engagement, collaboration, and accessibility. However, is also raises concerns regarding academic honesty and plagiarism. This paper examines the opportunities and challenges of using ChatGPT in higher education, and discusses the potential risks and rewards of these tools. The paper also considers the difficulties of detecting and preventing academic dishonesty, and suggests strategies that universities can adopt to ensure ethical and responsible use of these tools. These strategies include developing policies and procedures, providing training and support, and using various methods to detect and prevent cheating. The paper concludes that while the use of AI in higher education presents both opportunities and challenges, universities can effectively address these concerns by taking a proactive and ethical approach to the use of these tools
The power of arts-based CPDL for ‘educationally isolated’ schools
No full textProfessor Tanya Ovenden-Hope, Provost and Professor of Education at Plymouth Marjon University and Advisory Board Member for our Teacher Development Fund (TDF), shares some of her research into ‘educationally isolated’ schools and explores the impact of TDF within such settings
The importance of reaction time to the starting signal on race results in elite motorcycle speedway racing
Full text linkThe study aimed to determine whether the reaction time (RT) to the starting signal has an impact on the points scored by elite male motorcycle speedway riders, or whether it depends on the starting position (gate). Differences among junior and senior riders, and how it changes during a single match (15 heats) and in the subsequent phases of the competitive season (the main and knockout phases) were investigated. The database of reaction times to the starting signal obtained by motorcycle speedway riders was collected from a mobile application called PGE Ekstraliga ver. 1.0.66 (PGE Ekstraliga, Warsaw, Poland). The database included 1.261 results obtained by 65 male riders (age 25.9 ±7.6 years), competing in the highest league in Poland (PGE Speedway Ekstraliga) in the 2021 competitive season. Reaction time was measured using the Pegasus Speedway © telemetry system (Black Burst, Warsaw, PL). Riders scoring 3 points during a heat had the fastest reaction time (F(3,1257) = 8.90, p<0.001, η2 = 0.02), but RT did not influence the final result of the match (p<0.130). The times differ depending on the occupied starting position (F(3,1257) = 6.89, p<0.001, η2 = 0.02), with the fastest RT in the inner position–A compared to the B (p<0.05) and C (p <0.001) positions. Senior riders showed significantly faster RT (0.246s) compared to junior ones (0.258s) (p<0.001). The width of the starting line affects the reaction time (F(3,1257) = 7.94, p<0.001, η2 = 0.02). In the last (15th) heat of the match, RT was the fastest. The fast reaction time during the start affects the scoring of more points in a heat but depends on riders’ experience, the starting position and the straight width of the motorcycle speedway stadium. Coaches should pay attention to these factors when programming training measures
Group intervention for acquired writing disorders in aphasia
No full textBackground: One-to-one rehabilitation therapy is effective in sup-porting people with moderate and severe aphasia to improve their written spelling with the aim of using writing to augment limited spoken language abilities. To date, there has been little exploration of therapy for dysgraphia in a group format.
Aims: The present study was designed to evaluate treatment out-comes for impairment-based group therapy for dysgraphia supple-mented with home practice exercises.#
Methods & Procedures: Three individuals with very severe, severe and moderate aphasia engaged in eight group sessions of impair-ment-based spelling therapy incorporating game formats. Outcome measures included written naming of trained and untrained words and carer ratings for communicative effectiveness and functional use of writing.
Outcomes and Results: All participants made gains in their written accuracy. Carer ratings also indicated an increased use of writing and/or communicative effectiveness following intervention.
Conclusions: A group format, embedding written naming in a social context can be a successful means of delivering impair-ment-based therapy for dysgraphi
Is there a place for love in early childhood education and care in England? Early years educators’ beliefs
Full text linkThe importance of love for young children is well documented. Increasing numbers of young children are spending time in early years settings. The recent Government policy announcement of free childcare for children from nine months is likely to increase the number of babies attending early years settings, so the concept of love within early years education and childcare has never been more important. However, the qualifications that enable someone to work within an early years setting in England do not mention love. Similarly, love does not feature within the Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage, which those working with our youngest children must follow. This research identified polarised opinions regarding the place of love within early childhood education and care, with some practitioners clearly uncomfortable with the idea of loving children who are not their own, whilst others believing that loving the children you work with is vital
Friendship: The ‘Achilles Heel’ of European Youth Work Policy
Full text linkThis paper analyses the historical development of friendship in youth work in the UK and more recent studies of the impact of youth work in both the UK and in the wider European context to argue that European youth work has failed to acknowledge this important aspect of practice.
During youth work’s initial 150 years in the UK three concepts resided at the heart of the enterprise: (a) the ‘club’; (b) ‘membership’ and (c) ‘friendship’. Friendship eclipsed the others for they grew out of the friendships formed between workers and young people, and the young people themselves.
Practitioners during this era expected to offer unconditional friendship to members, and to teach them the arts of acquiring and sustaining friendships via the modelling of virtuous behaviour. An exemplar founded upon Aristotle’s concept of friendship. Two recent research programmes highlight the degree to which friendship remains a core element within youth work. These are a comparative study of European youth work provision and a longitudinal study of youth work’s impact Each found the acquisition of and ability to make and retain friends were viewed as key benefits accruing from involvement in youth groups. Both, however, stand in stark contrast to current formulations regarding youth work’s future role in Europe which pay scant attention to the centrality of friendship This article discusses these developments and the important role friendship has and can play within youth wor
Transformative Evaluation case study: Evaluation of Student Colleagues scheme
Full text linkProgramme Context
A small institution, Plymouth Marjon University (PMU) was granted degree-awarding powers in 2013.
The Student Colleague (SC) scheme was developed in 2019 in the context of the university’s Access and Participation Plan (APP), which identified gaps in student employability outcomes for students in POLAR4 Q1 and 2 compared to Q3-5 and students with and without a declared disability. Acknowledging that a student’s access to quality employability experiences can be limited, particularly in cases of disadvantage and/or disability, the scheme offers a range of university-based, paid graduate-level employment opportunities open to student applications.
Evaluation Context
At the time of the study, the SC scheme’s implementation was in flux; efforts to improve the scheme meant that revisions, changes and additional activities were either in progress or planned. Further, not all of the stakeholders contributed to the development of the initial Theory of Change.
The project team chose to use Transformative Evaluation (TE), a fork of the Most Significant Change (MSC) methodology, to evaluate the impact of the programme.
TE is a qualitative evaluation method that examines practice in its natural settings to make sense of the outcomes and processes in terms of the meanings people bring to it (Cooper, 2017). TE has specific qualities that the project team felt made it appropriate to scrutinise, question, and reinforce the existing Theory of Change and to explore the programme outcomes:
• TE uses story generation to expose the experiences recipients have of a practice. These stories become the subject of a series of critically reflective activities that include relevant stakeholders who focus on the learning that takes place for those stakeholders and the organisations they are part of. This enables evaluators to identify important processes, relationships, and events that influence the success of the scheme, but are hard to quantify and are poorly captured using traditional evaluation techniques.
• TE offers a transparent, inclusive, and democratic way to generate, analyse, and respond to stories, and promotes collaborative accountability by exploring the issues surfaced by stories within a shared and structured format. These qualities suited this evaluation as logic chains between the intervention and target metrics were yet to be fully developed. TE supported this articulation and helped identify which aspects of the scheme led to intended outcomes of interest.
• TE enables practitioners to become evaluators and support their professional development through hands-on experience and reflective practice. Engaging more staff in research and evaluation activities is one of PMU’s strategic aims.
• TE brings to the fore voices of marginalized and underrepresented groups. This was particularly relevant to the target population of this evaluation, which included students who are underrepresented in HE.
Although TE is related to Most Significant Change methodology, the process and series of steps vary. MSC is often used in large-scale interventions, such as international development. As used here, TE is well adapted to smaller-scale projects. For a useful comparison between TE and MSC see the PMU local evaluation report, p.19
“Beyond My Wildest Dreams”: The Reach and Impact of Sport Education
No full textThe connection between the name “Daryl Siedentop” and the model “Sport Education” has evolved over the past three decades to become a prominent brand of physical education. This paper attempts to capture the influence of Sport Education, not only within school physical education, but in ways and arenas far beyond Daryl’s original imagination. It is now used in university physical education courses and teacher preparation programs, in summer camps, and there is evidence of some use in after-school and community sports settings. This evolution has manifest pedagogical iterations of the model far beyond the essential features articulated in his initial vision, and teachers, students, prospective teachers, and coaches have all found a renewed vigor in their sport experience. The paper describes some of these “beyond” iterations of the model as a tribute to how Sport Education has served to realize multiple objectives for multiple practitioners in ways beyond his original aspirations
UK speech and language therapists’ assessment of children's expressive language, and functional impairment and impact, following the CATALISE publications
Full text linkBackground: In 2016/17, the CATALISE Consortium published the results of a multinational and multidisciplinary Delphi consensus study, representing agreement among professionals about the definition and process of identification of children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (Bishop et al.,2016, 2017). The extent to which the current clinical practice of UK speech and language therapists (SLTs) reflects the CATALISE consensus statements is unknown.
Aims: To investigate how UK SLTs’ expressive language assessment practicesreflect the CATALISE documents’ emphasis on the functional impairment andimpact caused by DLD, by examining: whether multiple sources of assess-ment information are gathered; how standardised and non-standardised sources are combined in clinical decision-making, and how clinical observation andlanguage sample analysis are utilised.
Methods and Procedures: An anonymous, online survey was carried out between August 2019 and January 2020. It was open to UK-based paediatric SLTs who assess children up to age 12 with unexplained difficulties using language. Questions probed different aspects of expressive language assessment which are referred to in the CATALISE consensus statements and supplementary comments, and asked about participants’ familiarity with the CATALISE statements. Responses were analysed using simple descriptive statistics and content analysis.
Outcomes and Results: The questionnaire was completed by 104 participants, from all four regions of the United Kingdom, working in a range of clinical settings with different levels of professional experience of DLD. The findings indicate that clinical assessment practices broadly align with the CATALISE statements. Although clinicians carry out standardised assessments more frequently than other types of assessment, they also gather information from other sources and use this alongside standardised test scores to inform clinical decisions. Clinical observation and language sample analysis are commonly utilised to evaluate functional impairment and impact, along with parent/carer/teacher and child report. However, asking about the child’s own perspective could be more widely utilised. The findings also highlight a lack of familiarity with the details of the CATALISE documents among two thirds of the participants.
Conclusions and Implications: Assessment practices broadly align with the CATALISE statements, but there is a need for greater clarity regarding terminology and the assessment of functional language impairment and impact. This research should prompt discussion in the profession about how to further develop and adopt expressive language assessment practices which reflect the CATALISE consensus and support effective assessment