Group items tagged

"Objective - To describe the development and implementation of two courses designed to help university students avoid plagiarism. Design - Quantitative and qualitative analysis. Setting - A university in the United Kingdom. Subjects - An unknown number of university students who took a Plagiarism Awareness Program (PAP) course between 2008 and 2011, and approximately 3,000 university students enrolled in a Plagiarism Avoidance for New Students (PANS) course delivered via a virtual learning environment (VLE) between October and December 2012. The authors attempted to collect rates of continued plagiarism among students who had taken plagiarism education courses. The authors also surveyed 702 university students about plagiarism in 2011. Methods - Data collected from PAP participants informed revision of the authors' approach to plagiarism education and led to development of the second course, PANS. At the end of the course, students completed a test of their knowledge about plagiarism. Authors compared scores from students who took a course supervised by a librarian to the scores from students who took the course independently. Main Results - Students reported that many aspects of citation and attribution are challenging (p. 149). The authors discovered that 93% of students who completed the PANS course facilitated by a librarian in-person passed the final exam with a grade of 70% or higher, while 85% of students who took the same course independently, without a librarian instructor, in an online VLE scored 70% or higher (p. 155). The authors report that referrals of students who plagiarized declined significantly (p-value < 0.001) since the implementation of a plagiarism avoidance curriculum. Conclusion - As reported by the authors, first-year university students require more extensive education about plagiarism avoidance. A university plagiarism avoidance program instructed by librarians reduces the total number of students caught plagiarizing an

 Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the What Works? Student Retention and Success programme Thomas, L. (2012) Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the What Works? Student Retention and Success programme . Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the What Works? Student Retention and Success programme, . (.). pp. 1-100. Abstract Analysis and evaluation on the most effective practices to ensure student retention and success in higher education, in particular for those students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

 Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the What Works? Student Retention and Success programme  Thomas, L. (2012) Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the What Works? Student Retention and Success programme . Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the What Works? Student Retention and Success programme, . (.). pp. 1-100. Abstract Analysis and evaluation on the most effective practices to ensure student retention and success in higher education, in particular for those students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

"Academics often treat students' discipline-specific literacy as unproblematic. In doing so they may underestimate the difficulties for university students as they move between subjects of study that may involve different disciplines, language genres and academic practices. This paper describes an initiative aimed at supporting students in reading academic articles in preparation for completing an essay for an assessment task. This initiative involved a structured and collaborative two-week tutorial exercise that provided students with practice in using a framework to extract the main ideas from academic readings. Students were surveyed after this exercise, and their reflections of its value are described in this paper. The findings of this study will inform further stages of the project which aim to develop and investigate practical ways to develop student's academic literacy across several business disciplines."

"The Open University has collected and analysed student data as a means of providing information relating to student support and retention for many years. The changing landscape of higher education has seen the rapid expansion of uses to which student data is put. The Open University, in common with many other higher education institutions, is now looking at its use of learning analytics."

Whether or not you take a constructivist view of education, feedback on performance is inevitably seen as a crucial component of the process. However, experience shows that students (and academic staff) often struggle with feedback, which all too often fails to translate into feed-forward actions leading to educational gains. Problems get worse as student cohort sizes increase. By building on the well-established principle of separating marks from feedback and by using a social network approach to amplify peer discussion of assessed tasks, this paper describes an efficient system for interactive student feedback. Although the majority of students remain passive recipients in this system, they are still exposed to deeper reflection on assessed tasks than in traditional one-to-one feedback processes.

"This benchmarking tool is the latest in a series of resources Jisc has produced to help you improve the student experience at your institution. It was produced in collaboration with the National Union of Students (NUS) and The Student Engagement Partnership (TSEP) as part of the Jisc Digital Student Project (digitalstudent.jiscinvolve.org/wp/) and the Jisc Change agents' network (jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/change-agents-network)"

"This research project explored good examples of how academic and professional staff are working together in new ways to deliver the best possible student experience.The project addressed the question of how and why these models of good working practices seemed to work well. The research investigated how the change management process was perceived and managed by the key stakeholders, as well as the role of the management, leadership and governance arrangements. Key stakeholders included students as well as staff, and the research considered how the student voice was and is heard in the development of these models. "

"Many educational contexts now make use of student response devices - devices, which allow a student or group of students to send a response to a question back to a tutor in a classroom or lecture theatre. There is a wide array of devices and it can be very hard to choose which one you would like. This blog post is Part 1 of 2. In this post, I will look at the features that response systems can have. In the second part, I will look at some specific systems and highlight their best features. "

This report analyses the findings of the 2012 survey of various aspects of the student experience, including the amount of contact students have with their staff, the size of teaching groups, and the overall number of hours they devote to their studies. It updates the results of earlier surveys conducted in 2006 and 2007, and reflect on some of policy lessons to be drawn from the results

Despite their fondness for social networking and cell phones, most college students say they prefer textbooks in printed rather than e-text form. Nearly 75% of students to recently respond to a major new research survey from the Book Industry Study Group

"Findings from the Student Academic Experience Survey 2014 commissioned by the Higher Education Academy and the Higher Education Policy Institute show that while full-time undergraduate students in UK universities have high levels of satisfaction - 86% are fairly or very satisfied with their course - wellbeing among some students is lower than in the general population."

"Information literacy-the ability to find, evaluate and use information effectively-is an essential skill set. The authors examine how assignments such as case analyses and research reports help business students master these abilities and provide examples of how analytic rubrics with measurable outcomes are particularly suited to assessing these skills. Also demonstrated is how librarians enhance and support student learning of information literacy by teaching in-depth research skills. Working together, professors and librarians can give students a solid foundation in the information-handling skills they need to be effective and productive in the workplace today."

"The Reading Like a Historian curriculum engages students in historical inquiry. Each lesson revolves around a central historical question and features sets of primary documents designed for groups of students with diverse reading skills and abilities."

"The Reading Like a Historian curriculum engages students in historical inquiry. Each lesson revolves around a central historical question and features sets of primary documents designed for groups of students with diverse reading skills and abilities."

"During the summer of 2013, George Veletsianos approached the editors of Hybrid Pedagogy about publishing a collection of graduate student essays. The collection focused on these students' experiences in a variety of MOOCs -- from EdX, Udacity, and other xMOOCs, to improvisational MOOCs created by the students themselves using open resources on the web. Sean Michael Morris and Chris Friend assisted with the editing process, and the book was designed using GitHub by Kris Shaffer with help from Barry Peddycord III, Jesse Stommel, and Robin "

"Digital student project - Investigating the expectations of incoming students for technology provision in further and higher education."

"In Higher Education Focus Groups and Nominal Group Technique are two well-established methods for obtaining student feedback about their learning experience. These methods are regularly used for the enhancement and quality assurance. Based on small-scale research of educational developers' practice in curriculum development, this study presents the use of a combined approach that potentially offers more benefits than the use of Focus Groups alone. It proposes a combined method, 'Nominal Focus Group', which includes the benefits of in-depth discussion of a Focus Group and the prioritising of results of Nominal Group Technique. These benefits include questions for further exploration, initial data analysis and increased ownership of the process by students. In practice, the method gave rise to rich data and actionable outcomes that were used to make informed curriculum enhancements for the programme teams."

To inform the work of the Online Learning Task Force, HEFCE commissioned the National Union of Students to undertake research into the demand, perceptions and training needs of students in both further and higher education. The report's findings and recom

"A digital system designed to help university staff to collect and act on student feedback is one of two student-designed technologies to win £25,000 in funding from higher education technology body Jisc."

We use administrative data to estimate the effect of neighbourhood composition on teenagers' educational and behavioural outcomes in England. We exploit a unique research design based on changes over time in neighbourhood composition experienced by residentially immobile students, where these changes arise purely through residential migration among other students in our data set. The complete coverage of our data allows investigating heterogeneity and non-linearities in the effect of neighbourhood composition at an unprecedented level. Our results show that changes in neighbourhood composition have no effects on test scores but some effects on behavioural outcomes, which are heterogeneous for boys and girls