Aspects Of Learning Experience Research Articles

The Role of Tracer Studies in Enhancing the Quality of Education: A Case in State Islamic Higher Education

A key factor in creating and improving higher education quality is data and information from tracer studies, which are also alumni feedback. Nowadays, educational institutions must to generate graduates with both academic proficiency and practical work-related abilities. This study aims to determine the extent to which the role of tracer studies in improving the quality of study programs at UIN Sunan Kalijaga. The survey approach is being used in this descriptive qualitative study. It can be inferred from survey results that data and information from tracer studies can be used as a medium for quality improvement study programs at UIN Sunan Kalijaga. These indicators included aspects of lecture activities and facilities, aspects of foreign languages, aspects of learning experiences that support work, and aspects of graduate competence.

대학생의 성찰일지 작성 및 공유에 관한 학습 경험과 교육적 효과

The purpose of this study is to qualitatively explore learning experiences and student performances of writing and sharing reflection journals of college students in a lecture-based class. For this purpose, this research analyzed the contents of the students' reflection journal documents in ‘Multicultural Society and Education’ class. In addition, in-depth interviews were conducted with five purposefully sampled students. First, the aspects of learning experience through analysis of the contents of the reflection journal were derived as follows: 1) in-depth thinking experience, 2) active learning experience, 3) significant learning experience, and 4) reflective learning experience. Second, the educational effects of writing reflection journals included 1) meta-cognition, 2) understanding one's opinions and arguments, 3) long-term memory, 4) effective writing skills, and 5) promoting change of challenging behavior. Third, the educational effects of sharing reflection journals included 1) intellectual stimulation, 2) development of learning strategies, 3) empathy and receptive Attitude, 4) expansion of perspectives on phenomena, and 5) engagement as an instructional designer. Based on the research results, theoretical and practical implications for college students' reflection journals were presented.

Information literacy as a learning outcome in marketing research

Becoming familiar with the processes of obtaining information and applying it in new ways are important to learning how to do marketing research. This article describes an innovative approach to developing information literacy through a series of student marketing research projects developed for use in a virtual learning environment. These projects incorporate the latest ideas presented in the marketing education literature; each has clear learning goals and relates student activities to aspects of experiential learning. Thus, the project designs promote information literacy and require students to close the learning loop by communicating marketing research insights in a manner suitable for business managers. The authors recommend that students work individually, rather than in teams, to maximize flexibility and the breadth of learning. Student engagement, enhanced information literacy, and student satisfaction with interactivity and learning from project assignments offer measures of academic success.

First-Year Students’ Perceptions of Their Learning Experience at Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City

This study explored how first-year students perceived their learning experience at Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh city (IUH). The freshmen’s learning experience was measured by their academic, social, and emotional involvement in educationally purposeful activities. The research also examined the intercorrelations of various aspects of learning experience and their relationships with freshmen’s satisfaction and sense of belonging. Data collected from an online survey with the participation of 898 IUH first-year students showed that students highly rated the quality of their lecturers’ teaching practices, the institutional support, and expressed their satisfaction with their entire learning experience. Data, however, indicated areas that needed improving. IUH first-year students did not make enough academic effort because of low levels of the coursework’s challenge. Moreover, the quantity and quality of the interactions between first-year students and other members of IUH were still low, which negatively affected students’ sense of belonging to the university. The study also pointed out factors positively correlated with students’ satisfaction and sense of belonging, including the institutional support, the quality of students’ relationships with socializing agents on campus, and the high quality of teaching practices. Based on these results, some suggestions were put forward to help IUH motivate first-year students to make more effort in their study; support and encourage students’ better integration with IUH learning environment; and increase students’ sense of belonging to the university.

Reframing Teaching: Interdependent Reflexivity for Developing Student Self-Awareness and EI Leaders

REFRAMING TEACHING: INTERDEPENDENT REFLEXIVITY FOR DEVELOPING STUDENT SELF-AWARENESS AND EMOTIONALLY INTELLIGENT LEADERS Developing self-awareness as a management instructor and modeling this process for students’ similar awareness has notable benefits on the overall learning environment in a classroom. In this paper, we reframe faculty and student selves in terms of usual roles and responsibilities, providing an iterative, holistic process of embedded interdependent self-awareness development with a flexible, changeable instructional design where students experience a sense of empowerment and control over their learning, integral to mutual success. Our experiences about teaching and learning draw on aspects of experiential learning, Gestalt psychology, and self-determination theory. We explore reframing teaching including the approach to designing a course, centering the autonomy of students, co-creating cultures of psychological safety, and the instructor’s use of self as a tool for creating an intrinsically motivating student-centered learning environment in an undergraduate leadership course. This evidence-based reflective paper uses three team profiles from one class, drawing on student reflection assignments. Each team developed self-awareness through different experiences, facilitated by their choices, which enabled their learning about self, group process skills, and emotional management for future success as emotionally intelligent leaders. The team profiles illustrate methods of modeling, use of self, and the importance of student and faculty reflexivity for self-awareness of patterns of behaviors, feelings, and thinking. Finally, we discuss practical applications, identifying reflexivity, psychological safety, modeling, iterative feedback, and student autonomy as key to the process.

Photovoice as a Research Technique for Student Learning and Empowerment: A Case Study from a South Texas Border Town

Criminal justice (CJ) education often includes culminating research courses as part of its curriculum. Many of these courses follow a traditional process of considering ethics, theory, research design, quantitative and qualitative methods, and aspects of experiential learning. However, the pedagogy around engaging contemporary modes of knowledge building in CJ, especially those that critique traditional models and rely on new technologies, is lacking. This paper documents our experience using Photovoice methods to empower students as both residents and researchers to systematically assess manifestations of social disorganization in a mid-sized city along the U.S.-Mexico border. We first introduce how other disciplines have incorporated Photovoice into pedagogy, then focus on using a Photovoice study in the CJ classroom to investigate and understand social disorganization in a South Texas border town and consider influences for social action. We conclude with lessons learned and ideas for teacher-scholar-activists to engage in new modes of research pedagogy.

Students’ Perceptions of Learning in an Online Multiround Business Simulation Game: What Can We Learn from Them?

ABSTRACTMultiround business simulation games have been gaining popularity in higher education. However, certain aspects of experiential learning of individual students in the game remain unaddressed in research literature. Team assessments, such as team papers, appear a common, “natural” choice given the team‐based nature of the games but may potentially mask individual learning outcomes. In this study we use a qualitative method to glean from individual students’ papers a deeper understanding of the process of learning of individual students in a team‐based, multiround business simulation game. Our findings indicate that individual and timely assessments are necessary to identify cases of not meeting the expected individual learning outcomes for the instructor's corrective intervention. This study contributes to the understanding of the process and outcomes of student learning in a multiround business simulation game, methods of teaching a supply chain and operations class with a simulation, and methods for better aligning course goals and assessments.

Development of Remote Instrumentation and Control for Laboratory Experiments using Handheld Devices

The unprecedented growth in Internet technologies has created revolutionary changes in the use of collaborative learning tools with remote experimentation. These tools enhance the experiential learning aspects of engineering education. Laboratory experiments are integral part of science and engineering education. Automation is changing the nature of these laboratories, and the focus of the system designer is on the availability of various interfacing tools to access the laboratory hardware remotely with the integration of computer supported learning environment.Work on laboratory experiments and project works requires access to expensive hardware equipments. The high cost of these instruments along with time consuming development process of experimentation in the educational process creates a significant bottleneck. There is a need for the development of remote laboratory using which the users can access the laboratory instruments and the programmable devices remotely on their smart phones/tablets to perform the laboratory experiments. This implementation avails laboratory facility for complete twenty four hours a day and will increase the productivity of the laboratory hardware and measuring instruments.This paper presents the detailed architecture and the implementation details of remote laboratory by which user can perform laboratory experiments remotely. Develop mobile based remote laboratory where user can access remote laboratory on his smart phone or tablet to perform the experiments. Software application is developed on Android platform for the implementation.

The Other Sides of History

This article outlines an experiential learning project with international students who visited St. Louis to investigate the Ferguson protests of 2014-2015. While students demonstrated increased engagement and depth of knowledge following their visit, they did not always grasp the nuances of historical and civic thinking that the trip was intended to teach. Such pedagogical challenges exemplify many of the obstacles facing instructors grappling with projects that address contemporary racism and its history. These include: mastering interdisciplinary scholarship; engaging in personal, classroom, and community reflection; negotiating gaps between scholarly knowledge and current media coverage; and accepting the enormity and complexity of an issue like racism. Such roadblocks can prove discouraging to history and civics instructors, even ones dedicated to open and thoughtful conversation about difficult issues. As a whole, civic thinking came no more naturally than historical thinking for students, and integrating the two required more attention and more aspects of experiential learning than many instructors assume. The article concludes by addressing how, despite such challenges, student learning ultimately justified the project.

Embedding Teaching Critical Thinking Skills in a Philosophy Course

I explore methods for the explicit instruction of critical thinking in a topics-based philosophy course (topically or historically organized courses designated neither as Critical Thinking nor Logic). These methods make the classroom more experiential and less didactic and involve students in the philosophical process, allowing them to learn content while using the methods of philosophy to work through, explain, or produce similar content. Experiential learning—approaching learning as a “continuous process grounded in experience” involving the acquisition of practices, the specialization in those practices, and the integration of oneself into the learning process—enhances traditional philosophy classrooms, and explicitly teaching critical thinking skills involves the methods of experiential learning. After an overview of relevant aspects of experiential learning and addressing how experiential learning methods can be used for the explicit teaching of critical thinking skills, I explain four methods I use to explicitly teach critical thinking in my introductory classes.

The Pedagogy of the UniPollWatch Pop-up Journalism Project

The journalism schools at 28 Australian universities joined forces to provide coverage of the 2016 federal election. The UniPollWatch (UPW) 2016 project was the biggest collaborative university journalism project ever undertaken in Australia. UPW reflects several trends in journalism education. It exemplifies teamwork and embodies the most authentic aspects of experiential learning and industry engagement. In so doing, it boldly asserts that the academy and journalism schools can—and should—provide high quality reportage for the benefit of general audiences. While UPW first set out to provide a ‘teaching hospital’ style venue for real world publication of student work, its pop-up online nature imbued it with potential to meet the aims of more recent best practice models of journalism education. The participating universities were free to decide how they engaged their students with the project, what content they wanted to create for it and how they wanted to prepare and debrief their students. Some offered it as a voluntary extra-curricular activity, while others embedded it in courses and made the work compulsory and assessed, some used it as a minor assessment and others dedicated whole units to it. This article details the variety of teaching methods employed by the different participating universities, using a framework of the pedagogical models applied to contemporary journalism education.

Netradicinių studentų patirtinio mokymosi teorinės įžvalgos

Netradiciniais studentais įvardijami asmenys, pasirinkę netradicinį atėjimo į aukštojo mokslo studijas kelią. Esminiai kriterijai, vienijantys šią studentų grupę, yra tai, kad tai yra suaugę ir turintys didelę patirtį studentai. Patirtinis mokymasis straipsnyje apibūdinamas remiantis užsienio autorių teoriniais ir metodologiniais teiginiais. Apibrėžiant patirtinį mokymąsi, išskiriami pagrindiniai kriterijai, atskleidžiantys išsamesnę šio mokymosi metodo sampratą. Straipsnyje aprašomas patirties vaidmuo netradicinių studentų mokymosi procese. Išsamiai pateikiama patirtinio mokymosi koncepcija, patirtinio mokymosi etapai, elementai, ciklai. Straipsnyje keliamas klausimas, kokios teorinės įžvalgos būdingos netradicinių studentų patirtiniam mokymuisi? Tyrimo objektas – netradicinių studentų patirtinis mokymasis. Tyrimo tikslas – atskleisti netradicinių studentų patirtinio mokymosi teorines įžvalgas. Tyrimo metodai: literatūros apžvalga, analizuojant ir išgryninant teorinius patirtinio mokymosi aspektus mokslo šaltiniuose bei pateikiant patirtinio mokymosi teorinių įžvalgų apibendrinimus. Pagrindinės išvados: mokymasis iš patirties suprantamas kaip modelis, metodika ar metodas. Tai mokymasis veikiant, t. y. mokymasis iš patirties arba per patirtį, leidžiantis plėtoti, ugdyti ir perkelti žinias, įgūdžius, gebėjimus, mąstymo būdą iš vieno mokymosi konteksto į kitą. Patirtinis mokymasis suteikia studentams galimybę studijų procese taikyti jau sukauptą patirtį, o realiame gyvenime pritaikyti tai, ką jie sužino studijuodami. Patyrimu grįstoje mokymosi aplinkoje netradiciniai studentai teikia pirmumą aktyvaus mokymosi metodams.

Spatial heterogeneity of climate change as an experiential basis for skepticism

We postulate that skepticism about climate change is partially caused by the spatial heterogeneity of climate change, which exposes experiential learners to climate heuristics that differ from the global average. This hypothesis is tested by formalizing an index that measures local changes in climate using station data and comparing this index with survey-based model estimates of county-level opinion about whether global warming is happening. Results indicate that more stations exhibit cooling and warming than predicted by random chance and that spatial variations in these changes can account for spatial variations in the percentage of the population that believes that "global warming is happening." This effect is diminished in areas that have experienced more record low temperatures than record highs since 2005. Together, these results suggest that skepticism about climate change is driven partially by personal experiences; an accurate heuristic for local changes in climate identifies obstacles to communicating ongoing changes in climate to the public and how these communications might be improved.

Emotion and Learning

I am delighted to have been invited to curate a collection of JME papers on emotion and learning. Several years ago I published a paper in JME called ‘Behind and Beyond Kolb’s Learning Cycle’ (Vince, 1998). The aim of this paper was to highlight aspects of experiential learning that were undeveloped in Kolb’s model, including the impact of individual and group emotion on experiential learning as well as the power relations that surround and pervade learning in context. It has been fascinating for me to revisit my earlier paper alongside the various articles (from 1988 to 2014) that the Editors asked me to consider for the Curated Collection. In so doing, I reflect on some of the themes and issues raised by the collection as well as implications for future scholarship and teaching practice. I hope that reading my thoughts and the articles included in this collection will inspire renewed interest in emotion and learning, and that this will lead to interesting new manuscripts for JME.

Enterprise education in pharmacy schools

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to investigate implementation of enterprise education (EE) through experiential learning, and its relevance to pharmacy education in the UK Higher Education Institutions.Design/methodology/approach– The paper characterises the state of pharmacy EE using Fayolle’s (2013) generic teaching model in EE and Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning theory as underlying conceptual and theoretical frameworks. The paper focuses on how EE takes place through approaches employed within experiential learning to develop graduates’ enterprise skills, and investigate the challenges faced within institutional contexts. The paper draws on qualitative empirical approach using the social constructionist paradigm to investigate experiences of pharmacy academics.Findings– The study identifies four Aspects of Experiential Learning in the context of EE (AELEE), which extend both Fayolle’s and Kolb’s frameworks.Research limitations/implications– The research focuses solely on views of academics in UK pharmacy schools, and is of qualitative nature. This could limit the generalisability of results, yet also offer deeper sector-specific insight into EE.Practical implications– Findings provide insights into the difficulty of positioning EE in non-business schools and the hurdles academics face. Findings are expected to encourage enterprise educators to design EE programmes that consider the institutional context.Originality/value– The research makes a significant contribution to existing EE literature with its non-business sector specificity and its focus on academics. Hence, the study responds to Fayolle’s (2013) call for more research into EE with focus on the educator, and deeper connections between EE and education literature.

In-Class Experiments as an Accompaniment to In-Class Discussion

Active learning, including in-class debates, is used in social science classrooms as a means of improving meaning and increasing understanding of complex materials. However, in-class debates do not fully satisfy all aspects of experiential learning because students do not get to experience the results of multifaceted concepts, such as strategic voting. In this article, I explore the use of an experimental voting game to teach the differences in electoral systems. Using defined payouts as policy outcomes, the results show that students who are exposed to known payoffs gained a better understanding of voting strategies under majoritarian and proportional voting schemes. Additionally, measured student outcomes in the form of a final exam showed a statistically significant difference in knowledge of voting behavior. In this way, I provide evidence that in-class experimentation can serve to complement other forms of active learning.

CRAFT AS A BOUNDARY TOOL FOR MULTI- AND INTERCULTURAL EDUCATION: A CASE IN TEACHER EDUCATION

Studies on boundary crossing and boundary objects emphasize that boundaries carry potential for learning. However, it is not explicated how the craft could be used as a boundary in multi- and intercultural education. This research describes a case of using craft as a boundary to facilitate multi- and intercultural education. It first gives an overview on the Multi- and Intercultural Craft course including a theoretical part that was organized through a virtual platform, Moodle. The course included also a practical part, a project, where Finnish, exchange students and a group of immigrants from Burma met in the context of craft. The students (n = 14) were asked to write reflective essays about the course. In the qualitative analysis of essays, their learning experiences that appeared in the data, were examined. Three aspects of learning experiences were identified: first a cognitive aspect, which is about increased knowledge; second an affective aspect, which focuses on changing attitudes; and the third an interactive aspect, which is concerned with how to get on with people from different cultures. Key words: boundary object, craft education, intercultural education, multicultural education, teacher education.

Facilitating the Development of Study Skills through a Blended Learning Approach

This study examined the effectiveness of a Blended Learning (BL) environment designed to facilitate the learning of study skills with a large (over 200) and diverse undergraduate student cohort in a Higher Education (HE) institution in the UK. A BL environment was designed using the model provided by Kerres & De Witt (2003), and was also designed to be consistent with Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning cycle. Eight focus groups with six students were undertaken to examine student perceptions of their learning experience, and to establish if learning had taken place in each phase of Kolb’s (1984) cycle. All students also completed a reflective study skills essay, and a sample of these were scrutinised for evidence of certain aspects of experiential learning. Student engagement in the module and the BL environment was examined through small group tutorials. The results suggest that the module encouraged a high level of student engagement, and learning in each stage of Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning cycle, and that the use of a BL environment facilitated aspects of this experiential learning. Teachers in HE should therefore consider the potential benefits of a blended learning approach as a means of facilitating the experiential learning of study skills.

Web-Based Collaborative Learning Architecture for Remote Experiment on Control of Bioreactor’s Environment

The unprecedented growth in Internet technologies has created revolutionary changes in collaborative working in an on-line environment with round the world accessibility. The adoption of collaborative learning tools with remote laboratory enhances the experiential learning aspects of engineering education. This paper presents a collaborative learning and remote experiment on the control of a bioreactor environment by establishing communication between the process control computer and remote users through the Internet. The software application is developed using graphical programming tools to control the process parameters and to set the control constants associated with the PID control system. The LabVIEW virtual instruments transfer information to web clients is performed using web server and standard internet browsers for data access. Multimedia features are added to the architecture to supplement the teaching and learning activities. The proposed system structure and functionalities tend towards the translation of traditional collaborative characteristics into an Internet based on-line collaborative learning environment.

Repertoire of practice: Reconceptualizing instructor competency in contemporary adventure education

Historically, adventure educators have used the metaphor of hard and soft skills to understand their practice: hard skills representing technical competencies, and soft skills representing interpersonal competencies. In light of current research and in the face of increasingly complex varieties of adventure practice, the categorization of skills into “hard” or “soft” may obscure important aspects of experiential learning and limit the development of an effective pedagogy for adventure education. This paper interrogates the hard/soft metaphor from various perspectives and offers “repertoire of practice” (Wenger, 1998) as a possible framework to further discuss instruction and learning in contemporary adventure education. ‘What we have learned to see something as, becomes in turn, the guide to our outward practical activity’. (Wartofsky, 1979, p. 207)