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This chapter consists of two reflective accounts from Slovenia. Both accounts are connected with Barica Marentič Požarnik, who in Part I of this 30th anniversary volume directly linked her personal professional development to the International Study Association on Teachers and Teaching (ISATT) during its emergent years as an organisation. In this chapter in the fifth and closing section, Marentič Požarnik’s counterparts follow in the footsteps that their senior colleague and mentor planted and make tracks of their own. They crystallise how ISATT has affected their professional development and influenced their lines of research as they - and ISATT - press towards the future.

The first part of this chapter addresses the history and development of the International Study Association of Teachers and Teaching (ISATT) and its engagement with the global educational community. We provide an account of the context and background against which ISATT developed as well as information about the founders’ orientations and the actions that led to ISATT’s birth. The second part of the chapter uses patterns of topic focus as graphic indicators of the evolution of ISATT’s research interests expressed through publication titles.

This chapter describes an innovative method of curriculum design that is based on combining phenomenographic research, and the associated variation theory of learning, with the notion of disciplinary threshold concepts to focus specialised design attention on the most significant and difficult parts of the curriculum. The method involves three primary stages: (i) identification of disciplinary concepts worthy of intensive curriculum design attention, using the criteria for threshold concepts; (ii) action research into variation in students’ understandings/misunderstandings of those concepts, using phenomenography as the research approach; (iii) design of learning activities to address the poorer understandings identified in the second stage, using variation theory as a guiding framework. The curriculum design method is inherently theory and evidence based. It was developed and trialed during a two-year project funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, using physics and law disciplines as case studies. Disciplinary teachers’ perceptions of the impact of the method on their teaching and understanding of student learning were profound. Attempts to measure the impact on student learning were less conclusive; teachers often unintentionally deviated from the design when putting it into practice for the first time. Suggestions for improved implementation of the method are discussed.

This chapter explores the theorising practices of successful researchers in higher education. The biographical case studies use teaching and learning as their focus to provide four succinct accounts of how the researcher’s thinking around their signature concepts evolved over time. They analyse the narrative that surrounds these signature concepts to understand what successful researchers do with their ideas to maximise their symbolic capital in the higher education research field. The researcher’s experiences of theorising highlight the contextual factors that have influenced them as they tried to explain how they achieved the outcomes of their research. The chapter concludes with an overview of the beneficial strategies used in these four cases, so potential researchers can appreciate the approaches to theorising that are compatible with higher education research traditions.

This paper aims to identify the threshold concept in intellectual property (IP) law.

It used doctrinal methods for such identification based on the existing pedagogical scholarship in the field of effective teaching and learning.

It explained how the use of the threshold concept in IP law education could facilitate understanding of IP law from globalised perspectives and validate use of IP in a balanced way.

It is yet to be tested for practical curriculum design in different jurisdictions.

The understanding of threshold concepts in IP law could generate “eureka” moments, when, after a long struggle, students come to a deep understanding of a new concept.

This will facilitate social acceptance of IP for balancing global obligation and national developmental and social goals.

Till date, little work has been undertaken on the threshold concepts on IP law. Therefore, this study tried to make a unique contribution by identifying threshold concepts in intellectual property law.

The purpose of this paper is to report on a study of teacher learning through participation in sustained collaborative subject-based professional development groups supported by a facilitator, using a model of teachers’ conceptions of teaching developed from phenomenography to identify what are the critical features of teaching that must be present if teachers are to learn, and using a variation theory of learning to explain how they learn.

The groups engaged in cycles of lesson study action research to improve the learning outcomes of their students. The authors intended to engage the teachers in an exploration of their own and their students’ experiences to understand the relationship between the enactment of the research lesson(s) and the educational outcome. The authors collected over 157 hours of video recorded teachers’ meetings involving 15 groups, 47 hours of follow-up interviews and 97 hours of lessons. In this paper the authors report on the progress of one of those groups. The authors analysed the transcripts to see what, if any, dimensions of variation were opened in discussion, affording the opportunity for learning. The authors sought the simultaneous juxtaposition, the bringing together, of threads that have entered the discussion that have the potential to open dimensions of variation – to add critical features to the “what” and “how” dimensions of teaching.

The authors identified necessary conditions for teacher learning through collaborative subject-based professional development groups. Any member of the group might bring this about. The facilitator or coach might be expected to perform this role in the group, and to sustain the group’s attention on the critical features of the object of learning.

The paper provides valuable insights into strategies to change teacher perspectives from a transmission oriented to a construction oriented view of teaching in the face of new and challenging curriculum demands.

In the work reported here the authors have used variation theory to design lesson study. This is rather different from a learning study where the teachers engaged in the study use variation theory to design their research lesson(s). It is a learning study of teachers’ professional development.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the key predictors of Master of Business Administration (MBA) students' performance, considering the interaction between personality type, learning approaches and educational achievement. A structural equation model is formulated to check out the relationship perfection between the construct variables.

The study subjects were 208 MBA students at Zhejiang University. A questionnaire encompassing three sections was presented to the respondents. The first section is the revised two‐factor version of the study process questionnaire (R‐SPQ‐2F) developed by Biggs et al. The second section consists of 20 items developed based on a review of the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) Five‐Factor Personality Inventory (Buchanan, 2001). The third section is about the respondents' background and personal information such as age, gender and their performance represented by their scores in the National Admission Examination System and their major course grade achieved during the first term of their academic year. A structural equation model was designed to examine the relationship between the study variables. Then covariance structural analyses of collected data were conducted for testing the model.

The main findings are significant correlations between the three personality traits, namely, extraversion, conscientiousness and openness to experience with the deep approach (DA) to learning predicting high MBA students' performance.

Personality type and students' approaches to learning constitute determinant factors impacting upon the education of management graduate students. Thus, institutions providing MBA programs must allocate more interest to examine their students' characteristics, in correlation with their performance rating. In this regard, the present study is designed to provide business education stakeholders with a modest model to depict the key predictors of MBA students' performance, particularly, part‐time MBA program whose participants are, in most cases, fully employed students, struggling to cope with their professional, educational and social duties.

This study empirically investigates the relationship between personality type and students' approaches to learning to find out their influence on MBA students' performance. The model results evidently demonstrate, on the one hand a significant correlation between these factors, and on the other hand their influence on the participants' performance reflecting high rating in pertinence with personality traits of extraversion, conscientiousness and openness to experience and the DA to learning.