Search results

The purpose of the paper is to contribute to an understanding of the relational work carried out in mentoring programmes and the implications for learning capabilities in future practices.

This study is based on field research of a mentoring programme bringing together senior and newly graduated workers in a large Swedish health care organisation. In total, 54 qualitative interviews with mentors, mentees, HR, managers and union representatives are included.

The findings point to the role of trust and a psychological sense of community in the socialisation work that goes on in relationships between the mentor and the mentee. This in turn leads to increased social capital in the form of learning and retaining workers. The conditions for being vulnerable and asking questions, as well as daring to be independent, are an essential and decisive part of constructing bonding within the professional group and bridging out to other professions and parts of the organisation.

The practical contribution from this study is the workplace conditions that are central to organising mentoring programmes, with implications for learning capabilities in future practices.

With its theoretical focus on social capital, the study shows the importance of relationships for learning and retaining both newly graduated and experienced employees in a context of high employee turnover. It is central to achieving strong and mutually beneficial relationships through continual and trustful interaction between actors. By using the concepts of social capital, socialisation agents and psychological sense of community, this study contributes to an understanding of mentoring and workplace learning.

This qualitative study aims to provide insights and reflections of how the pandemic affected the identity and a sense of self of students, who completed undergraduate leadership learning academic program.

Interviews.

Findings of this study showed three major themes throughout the interviews. During the COVID-19 pandemic, participants identified experiences with self-reflection, building community and navigating issues of social justice.

These findings highlight how leadership learning enabled certain participants to navigate and seek to resolve these problems and how their leadership learning aided their own self-discovery.

Transportation infrastructure asset management has long been an active but challenging problem for agencies, which urges to maintain a good state of their assets but faces budgetary limitations. Managing a network of transportation infrastructure assets, especially when the number is large, is a multifaceted challenge. This paper aims to develop a life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) based transportation infrastructure asset management analytical framework to study the impacts of a few key parameters/factors on deterioration and life-cycle cost. Using the bridge as an example infrastructure type, the framework incorporates an optimization model for optimizing maintenance, repair, rehabilitation (MR&R) and replacement decisions in a finite planning horizon.

The analytical framework is further developed through a series of model variations, scenario and sensitivity analysis, simulation processes and numerical experiments to show the impacts of various parameters/factors and draw managerial insights. One notable analysis is to explicitly model the epistemic uncertainties of infrastructure deterioration models, which have been overlooked in previous research. The proposed methodology can be adapted to different types of assets for solving general asset management and capital planning problems.

The experiments and case studies revealed several findings. First, the authors showed the importance of the deterioration model parameter (i.e. Markov transition probability). Inaccurate information of p will lead to suboptimal solutions and results in excessive total cost. Second, both agency cost and user cost of a single facility will have significant impacts on the system cost and correlation between them also influences the system cost. Third, the optimal budget can be found and the system cost is tolerant to budge variations within a certain range. Four, the model minimizes the total cost by optimizing the allocation of funds to bridges weighing the trade-off between user and agency costs.

On the path forward to develop the next generation of bridge management systems methodologies, the authors make an exploration of incorporating the epistemic uncertainties of the stochastic deterioration models into bridge MR&R capital planning and decision-making. The authors propose an optimization approach that does not only incorporate the inherent stochasticity of bridge deterioration but also considers the epistemic uncertainties and variances of the model parameters of Markovian transition probabilities due to data errors or modeling processes.

Recognition of prior experiential learning offers a vital contribution to supporting lifelong learning around the globe. The Malaysian government has placed great emphasis on lifelong learning in developing a knowledge society to achieve its goal of becoming a developed nation by the year 2020. Hence, the efficacy of recognition of prior experiential learning acts as a mechanism to enhance social equity and social inclusion in the Malaysian higher education context. In tandem with this, Wawasan Open University (WOU)'s vision and mission is to enculturise lifelong learning and provide access to adult learners who may have previously missed the opportunity to pursue higher education. Since its inception in 2007, WOU has developed a mechanism to review, recognise and accord validity to all prior experiential learning (PEL) of the learners. WOU's PEL comprises a series of assessment filters in three stages that are systematically utilised to gauge the learner's level of preparedness to embark on their tertiary education. These stages are (i) Certificate Attestation and Work Experience Portfolio, (ii) Diagnostic Test and (iii) a six-month HeadStart programme.

This study investigated the effectiveness of the mechanism and its assessment tools in measuring prior experiential learning of the students. The authors examined the GPA/ CGPA performance of two groups of learners. The first group consisted of those who have passed the diagnostic test and proceeded directly to undertake their degree studies. The second group comprised learners who were unsuccessful in their diagnostic test and had to undertake a six-month HeadStart programme prior to commencing their degree studies. The authors then conducted an analysis on the correlation between the Diagnostic Test results and the GPA/CGPA scores obtained. Similar correlation analysis was also carried out to examine whether learners who had undergone the six-month HeadStart programme performed better in their tertiary studies. Support services offered to these two groups of learners were also identified. The findings from this study also reveal the appropriateness of the various components embedded in the Diagnostic Test as well as the courses offered in the six-month HeadStart programme that aimed to strengthen the learners' knowledge, skills and attitudes prior to pursuing their tertiary studies.

Open Universities that subscribe to the philosophy of broadening access to higher education may explore the possibility of adopting the tested bridging programme developed by WOU for weaker Open Entry students to enhance the success rate of students and reduce attrition rate.

The purpose of the paper is to theorize how to develop student entrepreneurs' ability to reflect by means of a learning activity called the entrepreneurial diary, which seeks to develop self-regulated learners capable of intelligent entrepreneurial action. The importance of self-regulation in entrepreneurship is linked to the individual's ability to make judgments under conditions of uncertainty, which requires reflective thinking.

The paper builds on a synthesized conceptualization of three main literature strands, reflective thinking, cognitive-load theory and experiential entrepreneurship education. In addition to the synthesized conceptualization, it builds on some empirical insights derived from a venture creation master programme in which the learning activity has been developed and refined for the last seven years.

The main finding from the paper is the theoretical justification for why reflective thinking deserves an important place in the educational process and how the entrepreneurial diary as a learning activity can create a bridge between theory and practice in venture creation programmes that take an experience-based pedagogical approach. Furthermore, the study also provides some empirical insights of how students create self-awareness of their learning through the method and the metareflection reports. Self-awareness is foundational for developing conditional knowledge on why and when to make entrepreneurial decisions to balance the often action-oriented processes seen in venture creation programmes.

The paper provides both a practical learning activity to be used in the entrepreneurial classroom and a theoretical contribution on how entrepreneurial experience is transformed into entrepreneurial knowledge to enhance students' judgmental abilities to make entrepreneurial decisions in future entrepreneurial endeavours.

Emotional and interpretive responses to three short stories were noted in two study populations of similar age: Qatari students in a post-highschool foundation program preparing to attend branch campuses of western universities located in Qatar, and American students, many of Mexican-American heritage, from a small college in a rural setting in South Texas. It has long been thought that reading literature from a foreign culture confers educational value on the reader; in this investigation the nature of that ‘value’ was placed under study. Written responses to quiz questions or assignments were used as data; responses critical of or affirming of character, setting, plot, and literary tropes were particularly noted. Our data show that readings from an author whose culture was similar to the reader’s created interest and urged both intellectual and affective types of understanding, such as remembering, grieving, healing, forgiving, and feeling pride. Readings from ‘classic’ literature presented in historical context strongly enabled critical discussion among students in a multicultural setting, since the author’s absence from the scene ‘allows’ free conversation about his or her work without fear of insulting the author’s culture. Readings by contemporary writers from outside the reader’s culture, or ‘multicultural literature’, may cause some readers to shy away from the challenge of understanding another culture or to voice stereotypes instead of seeking ideas. Readings from outsider cultures, however, and the affective distancing of ‘othering’, enable the well-prepared educator and student to discuss how culture patterns our lives.

This paper describes how a pre-service teacher’s knowledge and pedagogy changed as she documented her reflective practice while teaching arts-integrated lessons in a fifth-grade classroom during her pre-service teacher preparation program. The pre-service teacher spent three-months conducting an action research project in collaboration with a university mentor.

This paper explores what she and her mentor learned as she prepared arts-integrated lesson plans based on the four studio structures for learning and analyzed them along with identifying and documenting evidence of deep learning through field notes and video recordings.

Analysis of field notes, video recordings and lesson plans led the authors to take a deeper look at where the four studio structures for learning overlapped in the teaching event. In the data the intersections of the four studio structures shared a pattern of increased evidence of deep learning for the students. This paper describes the phenomenon in the classroom at various points of intersection.

This action research study is preliminary, and the findings are suggestive of further research that would require indexing what deep learning looks like and gathering and analyzing student data.

It is recommended that teachers use the four studio structures to integrate the arts in their classrooms and to enhance and encourage creativity, communication, critical thinking, collaboration, character and culture and as teachers work toward deep learning for students.

This case shows how a university partnership provides fertile ground for educators of all skills and experience to participate in the expansion of the field of education as well as personal and professional development.

Amidst continued calls for the democratization of access to higher education for historically underrepresented populations alongside the first global health crisis in a century lies the opportunity to address persistent societal needs: increasing access for underrepresented minority students to educational pathways that lead to careers in lucrative fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

Student participants enrolled in the biotechnology pathway Associates, Bachelors and Masters programs share programmatic experience in an accelerated biotechnology program through a bi-annual survey grounded in the central tenets of social-cognitive career theory aimed at understanding requisite academic, social and financial support for student success.

The pathway program described in this paper emerged to address the need to support underrepresented students in degree attainment and taking on roles in the growing field of biotechnology through a novel, multi-degree, multi-institutional pathway to STEM degree attainment and career success.

This work has advanced understanding about how to effectively align higher education institutions with each other and with evolving STEM labor market demands while documenting the impact of essential academic, career and social supports recognized in the literature as high impact practices in broadening participation and increasing retention of underrepresented minority students in lucrative STEM careers.

Pathway programs which best support student success include robust mentoring, experiential learning and robust student scholarship support, part of the design of this unique pathway program. The authors share how this program utilizes high impact practices to provide low-income, underrepresented minority students with supportive, accelerated biotechnology degrees in preparation for success in the job market. What's more, of all our BS-level graduates thus far, 100% are employed and 93% within the biotechnology field. For many, the opportunity to raise their family out of poverty via a stable, high paying job is directly tied to their successes within this program.

In the literature there is limited knowledge about how to prepare students for a corporate entrepreneurial career. The purpose is therefore to develop a framework for understanding the role corporate development projects play in corporate entrepreneurship education, and to examine the potential role of the design of the project. The study defines a corporate development project as a project being part of an academic education to provide students with working experiences situated in an experiential learning process.

Based on work-integrated learning literature, the authors first develop a conceptual framework. Thereafter, they undertake a multiple case study using data from a Master's Program in Corporate Entrepreneurship. Starting from the conceptual framework, the authors employ deductive thematic analysis in order to analyze data and finally to develop an elaborated framework.

In the framework, the authors identify and label five categories of learning outcomes from the corporate development project. The framework helps understand the interplay between the different learning outcomes in students' learning process and shows how the design of the project shapes the learning process.

The framework can assist educators in designing and integrating the corporate development project as a key module within a corporate entrepreneurship academic program.

Based on the framework, the study develops the knowledge about the design of corporate entrepreneurship education. Future research should test the framework using data from other academic programs in corporate entrepreneurship.