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In response to growing dissatisfaction from employers, accounting educators have been called upon to broaden the knowledge and skills of their graduates. This leads us to consider how these objectives can best be achieved. This paper considers the relative benefits of various forms of instruction commonly employed by accounting educators. Facts and definitions, understanding rules, a worked example, and a worked example with integrated understanding rules are all considered in a single study which allows direct comparisons to be made as to their ability to meet specific learning objectives. The relative importance of practice and outcome feedback are also considered. The performance variables of interest are declarative and procedural knowledge, judgement performance, and knowledge transfer.

The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the implications for curriculum design by operationalizing threshold concepts and capabilities (TCC) in subject delivery. The motivation for undertaking this exploration is directly related to addressing public concerns for the business school curriculum.

A post facto analysis of a compulsory subject in finance that is part of an Australian business degree and the impact on a subsequent finance subject.

Customary approaches to granting part-marks in assessing students, (fractionalising) understanding of content can mean students pass subjects without grasping foundational concepts (threshold concepts) and are therefore not fully prepared for subsequent subjects.

Students passing subjects through fractionalization are poorly equipped to undertake deeper explorations in related subjects. If replicated across whole degree programs students may graduate not possessing the attributes claimed for them through their qualification. The implications for undermining public trust and confidence in qualifications are profound and disturbing.

The literature has exposed risks associated with operationalizing threshold through assessments. This highlights a risk to public trust in qualifications.

Operationalizing threshold concepts is an underexplored field in curriculum theory. The importance of operationalizing customary approaches to assessments through fractionalising marks goes to the legitimacy and integrity of qualifications granted by higher education. Operationalizing assessments for TCC presents profound, inescapable and essential challenges to the legitimacy of award granting institutions.

This chapter aims to advance understandings of agency and embodiment by considering the relationship between identifying as a feminist and choosing to engage in sexually submissive practices with men.

Thematic analysis of seven feminist-identified women’s solicited diaries and follow-up interviews are paired with a feminist phenomenological framework of agency and embodiment in order to highlight how inhabiting and investing in dominant heterosexual norms is a means of locating oneself in one’s own desires and sexuality.

Engaging in sexual submission as a feminist can be met with feelings of guilt and a sense of justification; a number of participants questioned whether these sexual choices put their political identity in crisis or open to critique. Others felt that their choice to be submissive warranted no problematization – even if the female, feminist subject inhabits dominant heterosexual norms surrounding what it means to be a woman as defined by heteronormative, patriarchal terms.

The present study is part of a broader PhD project based on heterosexuality and feminism in practice, where choosing submission also occurs between instances of sex (in everyday encounters with men) and beyond the context of sex (within the broader context of a romantic relationship). As such, choosing submission within the context of sex is only one aspect of this much more complex relationship.

This chapter aims to contribute to a growing body of literature that considers the way agency is conceptualized and in doing so, offers empirical evidence to show these theories are applicable to sexual practices as well as understandings of gender and feminism.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the usefulness of an agile social learning method in higher education to build capacity for sustainable development at the community level. Social learning methods intend to empower students (and instructors) to work together in connection with real-life issues – combined with acquiring a conceptual understanding – to analyze issues at hand and work out solutions. The agile format of the method was aimed at a subject that is adaptive and responsive to change to empower the students to take action toward sustainable development.

This study was based on a case study methodology where the running of the subject was documented and analyzed for two years. The target student group was maritime professionals who had an interest or were in a position to work with developing sustainable solutions in their home organizations (mostly in developing countries).

The results of the analysis indicate how the students learned about environmental, social and economic spheres of sustainable development and their linkages; how the subject format stimulated the students to develop different “learning paths” between the three spheres of sustainable development, which enabled a multi-faceted understanding of sustainable development issues; and, finally, how the students were able to design evolvable sustainable development solutions.

The results indicate both the novelty and usefulness of the agile social learning method to build capacity for sustainable development through the subject designed for higher education.

This is part II of on‐going research, the purpose being to establish a creative information‐seeking model.

Two studies were conducted to examine the subjects' creative information seeking behaviours and the extent to which they exhibited the proposed stages in creative information seeking when accomplishing a directed and an open‐ended information‐seeking task respectively.

Findings seemed to indicate that all the subjects underwent the proposed stages although they seemed to embrace characteristics of these stages in varying degrees. Findings also showed that if subjects performed the proposed stages more iteratively or non‐sequentially, then a greater amount of creativity was needed to accomplish the information‐seeking task.

The paper offers a discussion on the relationships between creativity, complexity of tasks, and levels of expertise in domain knowledge.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between preferred choice of school subject and student information behaviour (IB).

Mixed methods were employed. In all, 152 students, teachers and librarians participated in interviews or focus groups. In total, 1,375 students, key stage 3 (11-14 years) to postgraduate, responded to a questionnaire. The research population was drawn from eight schools, two further education colleges and three universities. Insights from the literature review and the qualitative research phase led to a hypothesis which was investigated using the questionnaire: that students studying hard subjects are less likely to engage in deep IB than students studying soft subjects.

Results support the hypothesis that preferences for subjects at school affect choice of university degree. The hypothesis that a preference for hard or soft subjects affects IB is supported by results of an analysis in which like or dislike of maths/ICT is correlated with responses to the survey. Interviewees’ comments led to the proposal that academic subjects can be classified according to whether a subject helps students to acquire a “tool of the Mind” or to apply such a tool. A model suggesting how IB may differ depending on whether intellectual tools are being acquired or applied is proposed.

The “inner logic” of certain subjects and their pedagogies appears closely linked to IB. This should be considered when developing teaching programmes.

The findings offer a new perspective on subject classification and its association with IB, and a new model of the association between IB and tool acquisition or application is proposed, incorporating the perspectives of both teacher and student.

Higher education research is replete with discussion of boundaries imagined as structural constraints in need of removal or circumvention. But, while foregrounding national–transnational frameworks, leadership strategising and institutional structures, the scholarship is subdued about how boundaries are actually dealt with at ground level. How do practitioners come together, day by day, across higher education boundaries; and what is required for desirable practices to be nurtured? It is on this issue, and in particular the theorisation of this issue, that this chapter will focus.

This chapter presents and develops a relational working framework, based on the work of Anne Edwards. We highlight three core concepts (common knowledge, relational expertise and relational agency), disaggregating each into constituent features. We then apply the framework to reinterpret previously published empirical studies, to demonstrate its broad applicability. We argue that the framework usefully conceptualises how practitioners work with others across boundaries; that it helps us to notice how many boundaries are, in fact, routinely permeated; and that it usefully highlights important aspects of local practices that are easily obscured.

This chapter shares the findings of a research study that investigated how organizations managed critical incidents that had the potential for dramatic economic impact and why those organizations chose to pursue certain issues. The findings expose organization identity’s role in stabilizing organizations. Understanding this role creates an opportunity to improve organization change efforts by examining and understanding a subject’s organization identity. Armed with this understanding, a change agent may design interventions in such a way as to align with identity or, when necessary, to specifically alter identity.