Editorial

Citation

Roberts, B. (2011), "Editorial", International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 25 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijem.2011.06025daa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Educational Management, Volume 25, Issue 4

An especially warm welcome to this special issue which has been guest edited by Paul Taylor and Glyn Mather mostly using their colleagues from Macquarie University Sydney, and I wish to express my gratitude for their positive contribution to the journal. The overall title is “Managing research in a business faculty: a system and its results”. It may not be immediately obvious that it is about educational management but as you read through the papers I hope you will gain useful management information, as the papers are an investigation on the impact on student learning. The most noteworthy feature the papers share is that they were produced under a managed scheme for promoting research into learning and teaching in the faculty. While the interest of this issue arises from the insights offered by individual research projects associated with each paper, a key part of that interest also arises from the way the collection as a whole explains and illustrates the overarching system under which the projects were carried out. The system known as the Learning Excellence and Development Scheme (LEAD), offers a model for promoting learning and teaching research in a university faculty. The scheme is helpful to both new members of staff and to encourage them in their researches, but also to established staff who see themselves as teachers rather than researchers. LEAD also supports experienced researchers.

The introductory paper by Paul Taylor explains the background to the scheme, particularly the cycle that ended in December 2009 and was also more than helpful to myself in putting together the editorial. The recurring themes are the challenge of large classes, working with highly diversified student groups, accommodating international students and those whose second language is English, and the use of technology in teaching.

The paper by Elaine Evans and Dawn Cable discusses a topic central to many universities in many countries i.e. the provision of language training to students who are not fluent speakers of the university’s official language. The paper addresses the basic question – what evidence is there around the effectiveness of programmes in English language teaching and discipline-specific language training?

Savanid Vatanasakdakul and Chadi Aoun’s paper was originally a project investigating failure rates in a large accounting information systems class, but developed into a more generic study on student difficulties. The authors used a pilot study method to identify eight potential challenges to learning that students might have encountered in their course. The students were surveyed to establish how prominently each of the eight factors featured in the learning difficulties they encountered.

Anna Rowe’s article looks at the wide range of different meanings which students attach to the feedback they receive on course assignments and other assessments. The author confirms that feedback plays a much broader role in students’ lives other than helping their grades as it has a personal, social and emotional significance. The study lists and discusses seven different ways in which students value feedback.

Cynthia Webster and Jacqueline Kenney describe an innovative way of developing an interest in research among students in a large undergraduate class. To further students’ research experiences without overtaxing available resources, a series of weekly research activities were embedded in the unit’s core curriculum. These tasks provided students with the opportunity to experience research first hand.

Ayse Bilgin’s paper is concerned with patterns of “deep” and “surface” approaches in student learning – whether learning gets deeper or shallower as students progress through an undergraduate degree, and what the demographic factors might be that influence depth of learning. The author compares two large cohorts of students for evidence of an increased tendency towards a surface approach to learning over time. She also investigates whether deep or surface approaches to learning are influenced by demographic differences within the group, by comparing the learning approaches of international students with those of domestic students; females with males; student with work commitments and those without; and students who intended to register for a higher degree and those who did not.

Yvette Blount and Margot McNeill’s study evaluates the use of online resources accompanying a text book prescribed for a postgraduate course. They can be labour saving which makes them attractive, but the quality can be variable so it is important for lecturers to be discriminating. The paper describes a systematic monitoring process.

Brian Roberts