Creativity is an important twenty-first century skill often overlooked in higher education curricula, particularly in the sciences. Students need opportunities to practice and demonstrate their ...creativity and gain an awareness of the importance of such skills to enhance their graduate capabilities. One way is to embed creativity into course assessment and link it to an employability context. This article describes how we used a staff-student co-creation framework to develop a group project assessment task encouraging 400+ first-year online students to express their creativity and demonstrate graduate attributes. We were also interested in students' perspectives of empowerment, collegiality and authenticity. Our findings indicate the task enabled student groups to generate a diverse array of creative educational products for varied audiences. Most students valued the opportunity to express their creativity and were able to see the connection with creativity and other soft skills along with future opportunities and achievements. The group work aspects of the task helped many students feel connected to their peers and in control of their assessment. Students perceived that this assessment task reflected multiple aspects of authenticity. We demonstrate co-created creative assessment can be undertaken in large first year science classes to facilitate student learning and capability development.
Background
Retaining women and racially minoritized individuals in engineering programs has been a subject of widespread discussion and investigation. While the sense of belonging and its link to ...retention have been studied based on student characteristics, there is an absence of studies investigating the importance of students' social identities to their sense of belonging in engineering.
Purpose/Hypothesis
This study examines differences in race/ethnic identity centrality, gender identity centrality, and sense of belonging in engineering by subgroups of undergraduate engineering students at Hispanic‐Serving Institutions (HSIs). Subsequently, it examines the extent to which these identity centralities predict a sense of belonging in engineering for each subgroup.
Design/Method
Survey data was collected from 903 Latinx and 452 White undergraduate engineering students from seven HSIs across the continental United States. Multivariate analysis of variance and sequential multivariate linear regression were used to evaluate the research questions.
Results
Latinx students had higher identity centralities but a similar sense of belonging in the engineering community as White students. Latinos and Latinas had an equivalent sense of belonging in engineering, whereas White women were higher than White men. In the full models, race/ethnic identity centrality significantly, and positively predicted a sense of belonging in engineering for Latinos and White women. Gender identity centrality was not a significant predictor of a sense of belonging in engineering for either Latinx or White students.
Conclusions
Race/ethnic and gender identity centrality are differentially important to the sense of belonging in engineering for students at Hispanic‐Serving Institutions based on their group membership at the intersection of race and gender.
Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study, this study assessed the relevance of shadow education to the high academic performance of East Asian American students by examining how East Asian ...American students differed from other racial/ethnic students in the prevalence, purpose, and effects of using the two forms—commercial test preparation service and private one-to-one tutoring—of SAT coaching, defined as the American style of shadow education. East Asian American students were most likely to take a commercial SAT test preparation course for the enrichment purpose and benefited most from taking this particular form of SAT coaching. However, this was not the case for private SAT one-to-one tutoring. While black students were most likely to utilize private tutoring for the remedial purpose, the impact of private tutoring was trivial for all racial/ethnic groups, including East Asian American students. The authors discuss broader implications of the findings on racial/ethnic inequalities in educational achievement beyond the relevance of shadow education for the academic success of East Asian American students.
Recently, there has been an increased interest in the well-being of students in higher education. Despite the widespread consensus on the importance of student well-being, a clear definition ...continues to be lacking. This study qualitatively examined the student perspective on the topic through semi-structured interviews at a university of applied sciences in the Netherlands (n = 27). A major recurring theme was well-being as a balance in the interplay between efforts directed towards studies and life beyond studies. This method of perceiving well-being deviates from theoretical definitions. Students mentioned various factors that influence their well-being. Responses ranged from personal and university related factors to external factors beyond their educational institution. This study contributes to the body of knowledge on the well-being of students in higher education and provides suggestions for educational institutions, such as incorporating a holistic perspective on students and learning; and focus points for the development of policies and practices.
The importance of students' sense of school belonging for many adaptive outcomes is becoming well established; however, few researchers have focused on college-aged populations. In this study, the ...authors examined associations between undergraduate students' sense of class belonging and their academic motivation in that class, their sense of class belonging and perceptions of their instructors' characteristics, and their class and campus-level sense of belonging. They distributed questionnaires to students at a southeastern university; freshmen (N = 238) completed the questionnaire. The authors found associations between (a) students' sense of class belonging and their academic self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and task value; (b) students' sense of class-level belonging and their perceptions of instructors' warmth and openness, encouragement of student participation, and organization; and (c) students' sense of university-level belonging and their sense of social acceptance. The authors found smaller effects on students' sense of university-level belonging for faculty pedagogical caring and for class-level sense of belonging.
Research on the 'ideal' or 'good' student tends to be situated within compulsory schooling. Few recent studies have focused on lecturers' conceptualisation and construction of the 'ideal' university ...student. Informed by 30 in-depth interviews with lecturers from two post-92 English universities within the social sciences, we explore how the notion of 'ideal' student is understood in contemporary higher education. We focus on lecturers' expectations of undergraduate students, as well as their views of the 'ideal' student in different teaching and learning contexts. We identified specific personal and academic skillsets that are desirable of students, including preparation, engagement and commitment, as well as being critical, reflective and making progress. The ability to achieve high grades, interestingly, is rarely mentioned as important. Implications for policy and practice are discussed as we present a much-needed update on the current features of the 'ideal' university student, which can influence student experience, especially the lecturer-student relationship.
The UK National Student Survey (NSS) has high status on the agenda of UK universities. Its rise in status is linked to its influence on national rankings and associated funding streams referenced to ...the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). Consequently, many universities have implemented further assessments of student satisfaction, thereby putting additional internal performative pressures on courses and individual lecturers. The research contribution of this article comprises an analysis of the NSS through Foucault's notion of ‘governmentality’, with a particular focus on his work on ‘discipline’ and ‘neo‐liberal governmentality’. More specifically, by utilising qualitative data from interviews, research diaries and observations, it will be demonstrated how the NSS functions as a ‘disciplinary’ technology of government which subjects lecturers, departments and universities to intersecting panoptic gazes and perpetual ratings. In addition, the NSS can also be considered ‘neo‐liberal’ in that it governs the academic population through narrow conceptions of ‘freedom’ and omnipresent competition. The article proposes that it is through the amalgamated forces of intersecting panoptic gazes, on the one hand, and neo‐liberal free‐market principles, on the other, that student feedback develops its power to govern.
The overall objective of this study was to examine the links between teacher-student relationship quality and student engagement, delimited to affective and behavioural engagement. We used a ...sequential explanatory mixed methods research approach that consisted of a quantitative phase, in which survey data were collected and analysed within a short-term longitudinal design, followed by a qualitative phase, in which focus group interviews and constructed grounded theory analysis were conducted. Participants included 234 students from two Swedish compulsory schools in the quantitative phase, and 120 in the qualitative phase. The quantitative findings revealed that teacher-student relationship quality predicted student engagement one year later, even when controlling for sex, age, and prior student engagement. The longitudinal association between teacher-student relationship quality and student engagement was unidirectional. The qualitative findings reported students' own perspectives on what they considered to be a good teacher and their ideas of how their teachers and classroom setting influence their affective and behavioural engagement at school. Two significant categories emerged: 'teacher being' and 'teacher doing'.
This paper examines the expansion of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and associated growth in the influence of the OECD's education work. PISA has become one of the ...OECD's most successful 'products' and has both strengthened the role of the Directorate for Education within the organization and enhanced the significance of the organization in education globally. We provide an overview of the OECD, including organizational changes in response to globalization and the changing place of the Directorate for Education within the organization, particularly with the development of PISA in the late 1990s. We show how the OECD is expanding PISA by broadening the scope of what is measured; increasing the scale of the assessment to cover more countries, systems and schools; and enhancing its explanatory power to provide policy-makers with better information. The OECD has also developed the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and PISA-based Tests for Schools, which draw on the PISA template to extend the influence of its education work to new sites. The paper draws on data from 33 interviews with past and present personnel from the OECD, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and the English and Australian education systems, as well as analysis of relevant OECD documents. We argue that PISA, and the OECD's education work more broadly, has facilitated new epistemological and infrastructural modes of global governance for the OECD in education.
This study extends previous research on teachers' self-efficacy by exploring reciprocal effects of teachers' self-efficacy and instructional quality in a longitudinal panel study. The study design ...combined a self-report measure of teacher self-efficacy with teacher and student ratings of instructional quality (assessing cognitive activation, classroom management, and individual learning support for students), and 2-level cross-lagged structural equation analyses were conducted. Data were collected from 155 German secondary mathematics teachers and 3,483 Grade 9 students at 2 measurement points. Although cross-sectional correlations between self-efficacy beliefs and characteristics of instruction were substantiated, the analyses only partially confirmed a causal effect of teachers' self-efficacy on later instructional quality. Instead, the analyses revealed a reverse effect of instructional quality on teachers' self-efficacy, with students' experience of cognitive activation and teachers' ratings of classroom management predicting teachers' subsequent self-efficacy. Our findings emphasize the importance of examining teachers' self-efficacy not only as a cause but also as a consequence of educational processes. Future research on teachers' self-efficacy should take a longitudinal perspective with varying time lags, identify possible mediator variables, and consider other aspects of teacher competence beyond self-efficacy when examining the effects of instructional quality.
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