Part C updates

Report om student centered teaching methods – launch next week!

Dr Tine Prøitz, NIFU
Professor Monika Nerland, UiO

As a part of the project, researchers from sub-project C have been working on case studies of educational practices at the course level.

The report with key findings will be launched with a breakfast seminar at NIFU on 23rd of January, 2018, at 0830-1000. Tine Prøitz and Monika Nerland present the key results from the report.

Read more about the event here.

The case studies examine aspects that matter for the quality of educational practices in course designs that employ student-centered approaches. Whilst ways of engaging students more actively in their learning processes are high on the political agenda and a variety of pedagogical approaches are developed for these purposes, less is known about how such approaches are
enacted in practice and the challenges teachers and students face in this regard. The cases presented here illustrate different pedagogical designs and approaches and how they play out in different domains and program contexts. Each case study addresses three research questions:

  • What characterizes the teaching approaches and ways of engaging students in the course?
  • What challenges do students and teachers face with the given pedagogical approaches and learning activities?
  • What can we learn from this case about issues that matter for quality of educational practices?

The case studies used a common methodological approach combining participant observation, interviews with teachers and students, document analysis of course documents, and a questionnaire to the students targeting their course participation and experiences.

 

Rachelle Esterhazy: How can we help students make meaning of feedback?

Rachelle Esterhazy, UiO

PhD research fellow in the project, Rachelle Esterhazy (IPED, University of Oslo), has together with Crina Damsa published an article on Studies of Higher Education where she examines how students make sense of feebdack processes. They describe the key focus as:

“This qualitative study proposes a feedback conceptualization informed by sociocultural notions, in which students co-construct meaning from the teacher’s feedback comments through interaction over time, with each other, the teacher, and relevant resources. Based on an in-depth analysis of undergraduate biology students’ discussions of feedback comments, we found that the feedback process takes the form of a meaning-making trajectory students move along by orienting towards and elaborating on both task-specific and general-knowledge content.”

You can view the article here. 

Rachelle has also  written a blog post about her recent work on the blog of Centre ofor Research in Assessment and Digital Learning (CRADLE) at University of Deakin in Australia. You can find the blog post here. 

Presentations at CHER and EARLI

Researchers from the project will be presenting some of the results at upcoming CHER and EARLI conferences.

From part B – researchers are presenting at the CHER conference  in Jyväskylä at the end of August. The panel is titled “Quality work in higher education” and includes contributions from project researchers ithat focus on internal systems and practices for quality work, disciplinary differences as well as quality management in study programmes.

Researchers from the project part C will also be presenting results from the project during the EARLI conference in Tampere, Finland, at the end of August. Paper presentations in invited and organized symposiums will disseminate mainly findings from Part C of the project, on pedagogical approaches that generate quality in higher education teaching and learning.

The invited symposium of the Special Interest Group ‘Higher Education’ will contain the paper Innovating pedagogical designs for student-centered learning: teachers’ approaches and challenges, written in collaboration by colleagues from Oslo and Helsinki. Another paper, Interactional meaning-making of assessment feedback in undergraduate education, will present material from one of the Norwegian cases analyzed in Part C.

Stensaker, Tømte and Fossland presenting at Nordic Council of Ministers conference in Helsinki

Last week, on 14th of June, the Finnish Education Evaluation Centre organized a Nordic conference, titled: Student-centred approach and the quality of degree education. The conference brought together over 200 participants from various Nordic countries.

Professor Bjørn Stensaker held one of the keynote speeches, where he focused on the relationship between learning outcomes and quality assurance, and pointed some of the issues of bringing quality assurance practice closer to the primary processes of higher education.

cathrine and trineIn addition, Research professor Cathrine Tømte and Associate professor Trine Fossland presented some of their work in the first parallel session. View their presentation “The teachers’ role in the changing landscape of technology rich environments” here (pdf).

The keynote speech by Bjørn Stensaker was also recorded and is avilable on youtube, embedded in the video below. Bjørn Stensakers presentation starts at about 55 minutes, after the introductory speeches from Anita Lehikoinen (Ministry and Education and Culture in Finland), Anders Geertsen (Nordic Council of Ministers) and Professor Riitta Pyykkö (University of Turku).

Data collection regarding educational processes underway

Dr Tine Prøitz, NIFU/HBV
Dr Tine Prøitz, NIFU/HBV
Professor Monika Nerland, UiO
Professor Monika Nerland, UiO

Part C in this project focuses on educational practices, including curriculum development, teaching and learning activities, as well as feedback and assessment.

Sub-project leaders Monika Nerland and Tine Prøitz comment on the overall focus of the sub-project: “To learn more about what matters for educational quality on the practice level in different instructional environments, we conduct observation-based studies of teaching-learning activities in selected courses that employ student-active approaches. Three case studies are undertaken this spring, and three more will follow in the autumn term 2016. In addition, two parallel case studies are conducted in Finland.”

The Finnish partners in this project are located at the Centre for Research and Development of Higher Education (YTY) in University of Helsinki. 

Data collection underway in case institutions
Data collection underway in case institutions (Photo: Rachelle Esterhazy)

Data collection is also now underway in part C: “We are now about to finish the data collection in the first three courses, conducted in a biology program, an engineering program and a nursing program respectively. Towards the end of the courses we will collect students’ experiences from the course by way of group interviews and a questionnaire developed by our colleagues in Helsinki.”

In the picture on the right, project researcher Rachelle Esterhazy has documented the site visit to one of the case institutions.

The analysis process is expected to provide rather unique data about the learning processes  in Norway, Nerland and Prøitz explain: “We are very excited about starting to analyze the data, as we do not have much knowledge about the activities taking place behind the doors to lecture halls, labs and seminar rooms in higher education, or how these activities support student learning.”

Read more about project C here.