Search

This paper reports on and evaluates the use of concept mapping as a learning tool in a large first year Management course. The goal was to help students make personal sense of course learning and to build their understanding of links and relationships between key course ideas. Concept mapping was used for three summative assessment pieces, including the final exam, and results indicated that concept mapping enhanced student understanding and personal articulation of connections between course ideas. The integration of concept mapping into all teaching and a number of assessments enabled the teaching team to ascertain students' prior knowledge, monitor progress, and adapt teaching so as to be responsive to learners' perspectives.

A key challenge for lecturers of many first year Management courses is how to help students create meaningful knowledge connections while at the same time introducing considerable foundational material. This article reports on an instructional innovation that explores how we can better design and teach a first year Management course that provide strategies which assist students to engage with course ideas and recognize relationships between concepts. In addition to deliberate and systematic alignment of design, teaching and learning strategies, and assessment tasks, we use concept mapping to support learners in the construction of their own meaning of course material; to connect, and integrate key concepts. Our approach demonstrates that when students are provided with the space and tools to support the development of meaningful knowledge connections, their learning can improve.

Societal, governmental, and research expectations of universities in contemporary western society have led to increasing calls for teacher professionalism and accountability as well as research excellence and research-informed teaching. Consequently, demands on academic staff development continually emerge, which academics may view as oppressive. This paper reports research that critically examined the commonalities between a pre-established set of discourses about resistance to teaching development and views about teaching and learning in academics' comments on student evaluations of teaching. The comparative study and the identification of commonalities are used to speculate about implications for academic development approaches both with teachers and institutions.

This paper reports on findings from a major New Zealand research project around staff perceptions of student evaluations of teaching. The main focus of this discussion is the insights that the research afforded into staff engagement with and use of student evaluations to inform their teaching practice and to improve student learning. The research data indicates that there is a gap between academics' relatively positive views of evaluation and their actual engagement with the process. A high percentage of academics, particularly at NZ universities, do not report engagement in dialogue or professional development activities around student evaluation. The use of evaluations in teaching tends to be individual, often isolated and unsystematic. This paper recommends some ideas for moving forward and argues for a cultural change that endorses, supports and rewards the systematic integration of student evaluations into teaching practice.

Internationally, centralised systems of student evaluation have become normative practice in higher education institutions, providing data for monitoring teaching quality and for teacher professional development. While extensive research has been done on student evaluations, there is less research-based evidence about teachers' perceptions of and engagement with student evaluations, the focus of the research reported in this paper. An interpretive approach framed the study in which data were gathered through questionnaire and interview responses from teaching staff at three New Zealand tertiary institutions. Results highlighted the general acceptance of the notion of student evaluations, recurring ideas about the limitations of evaluations and significant gaps in the way academics engage with student evaluation feedback. Recommendations for enhancing teacher engagement with student evaluation are made to optimise the potential for student evaluations to inform teaching development and to improve students' learning experiences.

This paper draws on a study of academic chairpersons' experiences in one research-intensive university in New Zealand. The research goal was see if there were recurring threads in chairpersons' narratives about their experience and management of conflict and challenge. The research revealed that one of the most pervasive stories concerned a set of beliefs about the nature of academia. This tale that was interpreted in a variety of different even contradictory ways was the notion that academia was or should be based on collegiality. This idea was often presented in conjunction with other stories about academia such as autonomy and professionalism and in opposition to the concept of managerialism. A second significant thread was a range of perspectives about the expectation that chairpersons should be managers of resources. This paper discusses these findings in relation to the literature and argues that we need to find new ways of expressing and enacting the values that the term collegiality attempts to capture and a means of integrating them into the current demand for performance, stringent resource management and accountability.

This research draws on the experiences of a group of tertiary teachers who compiled a multi-purpose portfolio as an assessment component of a postgraduate certificate in tertiary teaching at a New Zealand University. The research was initially undertaken in response to feedback from some of the participants that the experience of compiling a portfolio generated intense emotions. The data for this study were the retrospective reflections of the tertiary teachers on the experience of creating a portfolio as well as the portfolios themselves. The authors chose a narrative research methodology as an appropriate way to investigate a process that essentially involved the storying of the participants' achievements and identities as tertiary teachers. The findings revealed that some participants felt uncomfortable about the blend of the formative (or developmental) and summative (or evaluative) functions of the multi-purpose portfolio and that producing the portfolio evoked a range of complex emotions. These findings have led to the reformulation of the portfolio task.

Provides an example of staff and undergraduate student development through collaborative writing within a discipline. The "writing to learn" initiative involved staff developers working alongside academic staff and students within subject tutorials, which placed the developer at the nexus of both staff and student development and facilitated an ongoing collaborative dynamic with benefits for all parties. (Author/AEF)

Professional development of academic staff is an area which highlights the difficulty of embedding evaluation feedback into continuous improvement of teaching and learning. While most institutions require academic staff to conduct formal evaluations of their teaching, frequently little attention is paid to follow up processes which would assist staff in interpreting feedback and using it to enhance their practice. This gap makes it difficult to embed an internal evaluations culture and perpetuates a perception of formal evaluation as an add-on compliance process. As professional developers, strategies are needed to demonstrate to staff that evaluation feedback can have an immediate pertinence for their practice. One such strategy is to develop tools to support staff with the interpretation of evaluation feedback and suggest associated pathways for professional development. Within this strategy there are a number of options, one of which is to use rubrics for interpretations and signposting for further action. This paper describes a pilot project in which rubrics were introduced to help teachers interpret student feedback received through the formal evaluation system. Alongside the rubrics, suggestions were made about appropriate resources for professional development opportunities. We set out to investigate whether the introduction of rubrics could improve the link between evaluation feedback and professional development. Findings from the initial iteration of the project will be presented here.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]