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Implementing teaching enhancement is especially challenging when undertaken on a large-scale and with a range of participating institutions and stakeholders. This study sought to advance understanding of this under-researched area through cultural-historical activity theory, investigating four government-funded, cross-institutional teaching enhancement projects over a three-year period. Analysis of documentary, interview and survey data showed multiple contradictions within and between the activity systems representing the projects and the teaching practices in the involved academics' home departments, which constrained their impact. Through expansive learning cycles, however, the project teams found a way forward through distributed leadership, creatively aligning the project outcomes with institutional or departmental priorities. The distributed leadership practices also nurtured the skills of these academics in leading in their localised departmental settings, bringing about discipline-grounded teaching enhancements.

Workplaces are complex, dynamic spaces. While some practices are routine and highly predictable, informed by disciplinary and practical knowledge, others are unpredictable and emergent. Outcomes-based education, characterised by standardised, objective measurement of performance under controlled conditions, might be appropriate for routinised practice, but cannot account for emergent forms of professional knowledge. Somewhere between developing pre-specified, discipline-based skills and knowledge, and adapting to situated, contextualised conditions, there must be a capacity for dynamically developing unpredictable practices. This, we argue, should be an important focus of professional education across academic and practice settings. We interviewed 14 teachers and professionals studying part-time, across a range of disciplines, including medicine, architecture, law and allied health professions, about the alignment of learning within the workplace and university assessment. Using a sociomaterial lens, we offer a seamful account of educational and professional settings, manifested through assessment, regulatory bodies, technology and materials. Each seam represents ways of patching contexts together (e.g. accreditation stitches requirements of professional practice into educational approaches). Exposing such seams can reveal limitations and possibilities of classrooms and workplaces as sites of professional learning, whereas hiding the complexity of professional practice may be counterproductive to developing students' adaptive capacity to successfully negotiate practice settings.

The paper presents research findings on students' experiences of the provision both of guidance and feedback, and with respect to examinations as well as coursework assignments. A first- and a final-year bioscience course unit were surveyed in each of three contrasting university departments. The resulting dataset comprised 782 completed student questionnaires and 23 group interviews with a total of 69 students. Although the questionnaire data provided a robust overall picture of the students' perceptions of guidance and feedback across the six units, the interview data made possible a much finer-grained analysis of their experiences. At the core of this analysis was a guidance and feedback loop, within which six interrelated steps have been picked out, beginning with the students' prior experiences of cognate assessments and closing with the potential of what has been learned from a given task to feed forward into subsequent work. By pinpointing potential troublespots, the framework can serve as a valuable diagnostic as well as analytical tool. (Contains 1 table, 4 figures and 2 notes.)

This article addresses the themes of this special issue by examining the disciplinary dimensions of learning and teaching within undergraduate courses in the areas of biology and history. Key ways of thinking and practising that biology and history lecturers wished to foster in their students are identified. It presents a relational view of the role of these disciplinary ways of thinking and practising in undergraduate learning, and considers how domain knowledge exists in dynamic relationship with the practices that are implicated in its creation, interpretation and use. The epistemological challenges that students may face in grappling with a discipline are explored, and the intricate connection between the "form" and "content" of knowledge is highlighted. The article also points up the pedagogic actions that enabled students' affective and intellectual engagement with history. (Contains 2 tables and 1 note.)

Findings are presented from an ongoing study of three final-year, honors-level course units in the biosciences with a combined intake of 85 students. The data on which the analysis draws comprise semi-structured interviews with students together with findings from an Experiences of Teaching and Learning questionnaire. The investigation forms part of a wider project concerned with the enhancement of teaching-learning environments in undergraduate courses in contrasting subject areas. The findings presented in the paper focus on two interrelated aspects of the students' experiences within the teaching-learning environments represented by the three course settings. First, salient aspects of high-quality undergraduate-level learning are identified in the form of the students' evolving grasp of characteristic "ways of thinking and practicing in the subject". These ways of thinking and practicing in the biosciences were evident in the students' engagement with the research literature and with experimental data, and in their efforts to master the requirements and conventions of the subject for written and oral discourse. The second part of the analyses focuses on the teaching-learning environments represented by the three course settings. It was found that, despite taking markedly different forms in the three settings, the teaching-learning and assessment strategies pursued appeared to be broadly congruent with the promotion of ways of thinking and practicing in the subject. The quality of feedback to students also seemed pivotal, but needed to be understood in terms of the interplay of various factors, including opportunities for intrinsic as well as extrinsic feedback. Finally, the later years of undergraduate studies had called for a significant process of adjustment on the students' part to a step-change in study demands.

Describes a study of the computer searches performed by 14 education specialists on the ERIC database. Interviews with users indicate they felt retrieved materials were relevant, the database provides access to materials not obtainable through other sources, and the proportion of irrelevant items in the output is not significant. (MBR)

The article presents information on several research areas related to student's viewpoint on their learning. The first research area includes the work of researcher William Perry which deals with teaching problems related to intellectual development of the students. This study involves classification of students in three different categories. In the first category the students listens to the teaching problems and answers present by the lecturer. In the second category the lecturer allow the students to answer the problems raised by him. In the third category the students assume the answers appropriate in the light of its context. Perry's research also provides insight into students approach to reading. In this research area student identifies compares their understanding of reading with the research findings of the researcher Ference Marton. The third research area includes styles and strategies of the students. It provides insights into the styles and strategies of the students in handling complex subject matter. It includes a linear approach in which students step by step build up their understanding of the topic one at a time in a linear sequence.