Reflecting the diverse and international readership of IETI, this issue includes contributions from Australia, China, Canada, Finland, Malaysia, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, and The Netherlands. This issue includes some of the topics in Higher Education that continue to draw our attention and demand continue research and discussions. The topics covered by this issue include feedback practice, online learning, Generative AI, supervision in undergraduate and graduate programmes, student satisfaction, engagement, and student achievement.
The first group of papers focuses on feedback practices and what kind of feedback students find useful in supporting their academic writing. While these papers all have a focus on academic writing in a second language (English by Chinese students), each paper also shares how their findings can be beneficial to those in other disciplines. The first article by Su and Huang focuses on two specific aspects of feedback – praise and criticism from teachers and how students perceive and react to that feedback. The authors find that students value feedback that is specific (echoing other research), but students favoured and rated praise over criticism, especially during the early stages of their writing development. Students in the study found that while criticism could act as a ‘warning’ to the ‘wrong paths’, they explicitly highlight the cognitive function of praise by describing how they can use praise with specific guidance to overcome hurdles and improve their writing.
The second paper by Di Zhang, Liu, and Yu examines how Chinese students’ English writing feedback literacy could be affected by a combination of peer, computer-generated, and teacher feedback in one semester. They find that the combination of feedback improved certain aspects of feedback literacy: Appreciating Feedback, Acknowledging Different Feedback Sources, and Managing Affect, but other aspects of feedback literacy, such as Making Judgement and Taking Action is something that requires a longer period of development and scaffolding.
Following on from the need to develop assessment and feedback literacy and the difficulties in developing judgement skills, She and Diao build on existing research on the useful role exemplars play in the development of assessment literacy, and further explore specific contextual factors that make exemplar-based feedback successful in an online writing class. The authors find students value exemplars that highlight errors more than good exemplars. However, there is a caveat that the good examples in this study were simply shared with students, whereas the examples with errors were discussed in class. One aspect that the authors didn’t highlight is that unlike many other studies, they did not use previous exemplars from previous cohorts but instead, the student’s own work from an earlier assessment. This might have an effect on the stronger engagement with feedback the study reports, as students can immediately correct any errors discussed in class.
All three papers highlight the importance to consider the cultural context in China, but the importance of providing specific feedback is something that was highlighted in each of these papers, echoing established research in the feedback literature.
Feedback is also something that Farrokhnia, Banihashem, Noroozi, and Wals from The Netherlands, touch on in their SWOT analysis of ChatGPT which serves as a good starting point for anyone who is unsure of ChatGPT’s potential or is looking for an introduction to the potential and challenges of Generative AI in Higher Education. Farrokhnia et al. outline some ideas and implications of the use of Chat GPT in learning, teaching, and assessment. This paper serves as a good initial review for those who are perhaps still tentative and unsure of how Generative AI could be used in their teaching practice.
The next three articles in this issue look at student engagement and satisfaction, with two of them focusing on online learning. Maloshonok compares student engagement patterns across US, Chinese, and Russian research-intensive universities. Her research explores whether there are national differences in associations between student engagement and personal characteristics of students with a focus on gender, field of study, year of study, and plans after graduation. She finds no national variations in engagement based on these characteristics and highlights the importance of considering the personal characteristics of students and class composition, rather than national differences when it comes to assessing education quality and student engagement.
Romli, Yunus, Foong, and Soh share a small-scale study on Malaysian nursing students’ satisfaction with online learning. Their study provides insights into the different types of online learning activities could have on students’ satisfaction. Their paper reinforces the importance of a well-planned session when delivering online as well as an equal demand from students for didactic lectures and active learning approaches. Staying within the medical discipline, Ain, Ali, and Yasmeen look at factors that affect the learning of medical students in an online asynchronous course based in Pakistan. They focus on three core aspects, the learners, the design, and the wider learning environment, and share factors that promote and hamper students’ learning in asynchronous online courses.
Another study from the healthcare professions by Ferns, Hawkins, Little, and Hamiduzzaman, where they explore the use of escape rooms to develop collaborative practice between healthcare professionals. Fern et al. share that interprofessional education has largely maintained a clinical focus and their use of an escape room in a non-clinical setting has provided new insights into how interprofessional education could be delivered.
Continuing the theme of professional education towards career exploration, Lu, Gao, and Xiao look at the role teachers could play in supporting career exploration in China. Without the support of centralised career/employability departments, teachers and family plays a much bigger role in career exploration and this paper provides insights into student’s perceived level of teacher support about their career exploration.
Graduate and doctoral supervision is the next theme in this issue. McDowall shares the pedagogical underpinnings and details of a one-week intensive to support and prepare Master students to research Indigenous topics. McDowall explores how the use of specific activities such as annotation of literature in class, supervisory meetings in big and small groups, as well as 1-1 meetings, the teaching team can help students to stay focused on scholarship and keep students’ passion for the topic (in this case, promoting positive change for Indigenous communities) at the forefront. There are benefits for other research programmes in considering how they can better prepare and challenge their students in postgraduate research.
Staying within the topic of supervision, Pyhältö, Tikkanen, and Anttila examine the interrelationship between doctoral supervisors’ perceptions of their supervisory competence, the professional development they engage with, and the professional support from the research community, via a large-scale survey. There are interesting insights into gender and disciplinary differences in engagement with professional development, and the wider findings also provide useful insights into the type of formal and informal professional development activities that institutions might want to explore and develop further.
This focus on the supervisor’s development and competency links well with the next two papers. Seko, Malik, Lau, Neri, and Courtnage working in Ontario, Canada share a research-based live simulation as a way to ‘train’ supervisors towards solution-focused graduate supervision. This approach has a student-centred learning focus and is evolved from talk therapy to encourage the ‘client’ to focus on strengths, positives, and solutions. The authors comment on the success of the approach but also highlight the importance of a multimodal development opportunity for supervisors.
Bastalich and McCulloch from Australia investigate what doctoral students expect from their ‘ideal’ supervisor at the start of the programme. The expectation at this early stage includes what they described as ‘supra-human abilities and capacities’. The authors conclude that there is a need for institutions to communicate, set expectations, and ‘re-suitate’ supervision within wider institutional support during doctoral induction.
The final paper in this issue is a conceptual paper by Ajjawi and Boud, also from Australia, that challenges our current practice and thinking regarding how students’ graduate achievements are represented. The central argument of this paper is that what universities do currently in terms of transcripts and assessment results does not represent student achievements well. The authors argue that the process needs to be diversified and should reflect the distinctiveness of what students can do. They further that students need to take a more agentic role in the process. However, they do recognise that this is not an easy task and requires a significant change in assessment design, to record-keeping systems. Ajjawi and Boud present a few potential ideas such as a persuasive portfolio as a new way to present students’ achievement, which continues to challenge our current thinking of assessment and achievement in the age of Generative AI.