Editorial

This issue of Innovations in Education and Teaching International has contributors from Australia, New Zealand, UK, China, Spain, Chile, Canada, the USA and Taiwan. Several articles focus on learning and teaching with undergraduates including Jemima Grace Spathis, John W. Mahoney and Ben W. Hoffman of Australian Catholic University and the University of Southern Queensland, Australia in their work ’Improving hands-off health care professionals using simulation: An intervention study’. They conducted research with students into the effectiveness of simulation in health professionals who are ‘hands-off’ practitioners and discovered simulation may be suitable in developing students’ self-reported knowledge, experience and confidence when working with neurological cases for exercise physiologists.

Charly Ryan of IRUPTE, University of Winchester, UK also focuses on undergraduate student learning in ’Students learning as researchers of curriculum in an undergraduate programme’ which analyses an approach to student researchers considering their curriculum in an innovative module in an undergraduate initial teacher education programme. Open pedagogy encouraged reflective thinking, engagement in learning and ownership, and the appreciative approach shows undergraduates organising and managing their own learning, so becoming more engaged in their studies and those of their peers.

Continuing the focus on students as researchers, Hannah Gennis and colleagues from York University, Toronto, Canada and the Department of Psychiatry, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada ask ’Does exposure to university researchers improve undergraduate perceptions of research?’. They used a quasi-cluster – randomised controlled trial, exploring the impact of different formats of talks by university researchers on students’ perceptions of research, noting both barriers to and positive perceptions about research. Their results indicate that integrating university researchers into the classroom is a potentially innovative way to introduce and promote research interests in students.

Turning to language learners, Ching Chang and Hao-Chiang Koong Lin from the Department of Information and Learning Technology, National University of Taiwan consider the ‘Effects of a mobile-based peer-assessment approach on enhancing language-learners’ oral proficiency’. They incorporated mobile-supported PA (M-PA) activities into classrooms using Instant Response System (IRS) mechanisms to enhance oral proficiency for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students showing that the M-PA method can promote oral proficiency, facilitate personal reflection, and foster positive perceptions of learning.

J. David Cabedo and Amparo Maset-Llaudes of the Department of Finance and Accounting, Universitat Jaume I, Castellon, Spain focus on financial mathematics in their article ‘How a formative self-assessment programme positively influenced examination performance in financial mathematics ‘where subjects with a large number of students, or which are taught by a large number of lecturers often present challenges to formative assessment. Their programme progressively fostered the acquisition of skills and knowledge, was structured around the execution, self-correction and reflection on the approach and resolution of three case studies and produced successful results for students.

Turning to an interest on workload, ‘A framework to assess higher education faculty workload in U.S. Universities’ by Andrew S. Griffith and Zeynep Altinay, Iona College, New Rochelle, New York, USA, offers administrators and faculty with a framework to evaluate faculty members’ annual workload to ensure that adequate time should be available to meet institutional expectations and shows the negative effects of multiple course preparations and heavy teaching loads on research productivity. They urge that institutional policies should be adjusted to also enable faculty’s research productivity.

In their work on ’Simulation-based training as a teaching and learning tool for management education’ Liliana Neriz et al Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile and Universidad del Bío Bío, Concepción, Chile start by identifying ‘vertiginous changes’ in the business world making work environments more complex and uncertain which require professionals with practical experience. They move beyond memorisation learning to simulation-based training (SBT), an active learning methodology and use surveys and focus groups to assess the successful impact of SBT on students’ learning process to understand how productive processes affect business profitability. The sample included students from two cohorts attending a business school.

In their article ‘Exploring perceptions of and supporting dyslexia in teachers in higher education in STEM’ Jennifer Hiscock and Jennifer Leigh University of Kent, Canterbury, UK consider support necessary for academics who have neurodiversity and have been diagnosed with learning difficulties, particularly dyslexia, a sizeable number in a context where support has been focused on students alone rather than including academics. They suggest practical ways in which to support new academics with or without a diagnosis.

Linlin Xu and Jiehui Hu, University of Auckland, New Zealand and University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China offer one of the two interesting articles on doctoral students in Language feedback responses, voices and identity (re)construction: Experiences of Chinese international doctoral students. They draw on Bakhtin’s dialogic construct of ‘double-voicedness’ to explore Chinese international doctoral students’ negotiations with culturally differentiated voices, and their responses to their non-Chinese supervisors’ language feedback showing four kids of response: no revision, faithful revision, extended revision and self-initiated revision. They are shown to respond to supervisors’ language feedback and (re)construct their scholarly identity. The authors suggest developing a more culturally responsive and empowering intercultural pedagogy to facilitate international doctoral students’ (re)construction of scholarly identity in feedback practice and academic writing, as well as in the wider context of intercultural doctoral supervision.

In ‘A comparison between the conceptions of research of candidates enrolled for standard PhD and Integrated PhD programmes‘, Hairong Shan, Natasha Ayers and Margaret Kiley of Edith Cowan University, and The Australian National University, Australia focus on conceptions of and related approaches to research, arguing these various conceptions can assist in supporting candidate learning. They evaluated differences in conceptions of research between PhD candidates commencing at an Australian university in the standard PhD programme, and those in a new structured program termed the Integrated PhD using an online survey. The results highlight the need for structured support to help develop candidates’ understandings of knowledge creation and to recognise variations in their conceptions of research and research learning approaches.