Evidence-based Reflection Research Articles

To Work or Not to Work Remotely? Work-to-family Interface Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

This paper provides a brief, evidence-based reflection on the differences between 'old-normal' remote working and mandatory work-from-home during the Covid-19 pandemic. From the perspective of applied psychology in the field of work and organizations, we used self-report instruments to assess variations in work-family conflict and enrichment, frequency of information and communication technologies use, and recovery in two longitudinal studies. The first study involved 148 individuals from the technical-administrative staff of a large Italian University, during an experimentation of remote working (one day per week) in 2019. The second study, conducted during the first lockdown in 2020, involved 144 individuals (occasional sample, heterogeneous by profession). All participants completed a self-report online questionnaire two times six months apart. Although the two studies are not directly comparable, the results showed two different situations: in the condition of experimental remote working (one day per week), participants reported a decrease in work-family conflict and an improvement in recovery experiences, while in the emergency remote working condition, a deterioration in work-family enrichment was found. These findings highlighted that some differences exist between a planned remote working condition and a mandatory one in an emergency. We briefly discuss these aspects to inform future organizational decisions and actions for the 'new normal'.

Exploring the outcomes of a reflective teaching strategy with students: A feasibility study

Purpose: Reflection can be a valuable learning strategy for connecting theory with practice and illuminating insights and understandings from complex or messy experiences. This learning is critical for educators and health professionals who work or teach students in complex contexts. In anticipation of their future needs, speech-language pathology students, like many health profession students in Australia, are expected to demonstrate the ability to reflect on their practice as part of their professional practice or clinical education. It is challenging to support educators to facilitate reflection and students to learn when, why, and how to reflect for personally and professionally meaningful outcomes given the diversity in understandings and capabilities present in the literature. The purpose of this study was to investigate the feasibility of an evidence-based reflection intervention to clarify and support student reflective practice. Method: A convergent mixed methods design captured quantitative and qualitative results from 16 participants for a better understanding of the feasibility of a reflection intervention. Result: The diversity in the reflection literature also appears to be present in students’ reflection approaches. This diversity can encourage student engagement and ownership of reflecting when considered within a rich learning environment. Conclusion: Findings are discussed for timely, intellectually and emotionally safe reflection interventions that develop students’ reflective inquiry in the real-world.

Is psyche-soma dichotomy still clinically appropriate?

This article proposes a historical recontextualisation of the mind-body relationship and offers some evidence-based reflections on the current clinical appropriateness of psyche-soma dichotomy and psychosomatics. The debate concerning the mind-body relationship has a long medical, philosophical, and religious history, with psyche-soma dichotomy and psychosomatics alternating as the dominant clinical approach, depending on the prevalence of cultural orientations at different times. However, both models simultaneously benefit and limit the clinical practice.The neurosciences have reduced the gap between psyche and soma diseases, which can now be seen as overlapping and sharing a common pathogenesis. Diseases should also be considered as illnesses by considering all of their biopsychosocial aspects to avoid therapeutic failures due to only partially effective or ineffective interventions. Patient-centred care integrated with guideline recommendations may be the best means of uniting the psyche and the soma.

Making Students Responsible for Grammar Learning: A Report on a Learner-Centered Technique Aimed at Accuracy

Learner-centered approaches to learning and teaching alongside education for sustainable development (ESD) emphasize the education of engaged and active global citizens (UNESCO, 2017). The development of students’ reflective skills and metacognitive strategies is the center of this study that aims at investigating the learner language of a group of adult learners at an upper-intermediate level. It sets out to investigate to what extent learners are able to notice and correct their errors after reflecting on their spoken production. Moreover, it seeks to examine the students’ perception of their self-reflection and their attitude towards using speaking tasks for grammar learning. Comparative error analysis showed that the participants were able to amend 34.6% of total errors. These were made mainly in noun phrases (30% of total errors in Task 1 and 31% in Task 3) and verb phrases (40% of total errors in both tasks). Although no general conclusions could be drawn, the results seem to suggest that after critical, evidence-based reflection, the participants were able to notice and correct some errors, namely, in determination and the use of the past simple. The results of the survey analysis showed that all participants reported on an improved awareness of the gaps in their interlanguage, and all of them considered speaking tasks beneficial to grammar development. The study indicates that carefully planned, repeated speaking tasks might be helpful for learners’ language processing, consolidation of their grammatical knowledge and the improvement of their reflection skills and metacognitive strategies.

Literary Etymologies of The Ewe Names of Some Fruits

Purpose: This study seeks to employ the theory of literary etymology to investigate the Ewe names of ten fruits. 
 Design/Methodology/Approach: A purposive sample of ten descriptive Ewe fruit names was adopted for the study because literary etymology favours descriptive names and ten is large enough for phenomenological studies such as this one. The names were analysed against the nine analytical criteria of literary etymology.
 Findings: Findings reveal novel, informative and interesting nuances behind each name and show that conscious reflection rather than random arbitrariness informs the giving of these names.
 Research Limitation/ Implication: The theoretical framework of literary etymology employed in investigating the names in this study can only be used to analyse descriptive names, like the ones chosen for this study.
 Practical Implications: The importance of this study is that it allows one to acquire relevant information such as the history behind the names, evidence-based reflection, creativity, and comprehension of the deep meanings behind these common everyday fruit names that could be taken as ordinary names with nothing worth discovering. Finally, the study demonstrates that literary etymology can be used to examine common nouns such as fruit names.
 Social Implications: Findings of this study have shown that even everyday words are loaded with meaning and understanding these deeper meanings will improve our social and communicative skills. 
 Originality/Value/ Novelty: This study is but one of the very few that has employed the theory of literary etymology to investigate common names and proves its versatility as a framework to analyse all types of names.

Distance Education and Parental Role, in Italy. Evidence-Based Reflections from an International Survey, after the First Lockdown

This paper presents the analysis of the data from the International Covid-19 Impact on Parental Engagement Study (ICIPES) 2020, an international survey investigating the ways in which parents and caregivers were able to build capacity to engage with children’s learning during the period of social distancing arising from the global Covid-19 pandemic. The survey was coordinated by the University of Bath and involved 23 partner countries, among which the “IUL- Italian University Line” representing Italy. The domains investigated were parental engagement; school support for parents and children; home-schooling and family life balance, and confidence in the use of technology. The pandemic has shown several obstacles that families had to face daily in their attempt to educate their children, especially in a period where no previous models could be taken as a reference point. Therefore, it represents a unique historical opportunity for researchers and policymakers to understand all the lessons learnt from this global emergency and work closely with families, to support them inengaging with children’s learning. The Authors of this contributions, as well as the other partners worldwide, believe that school-family relations are far from being collaborative and supportive, especially in certain age levels, and that much needs to be done to co-design learning opportunities bearing in mind a more ecological vision, with formal, informal and non-formal learning occasions be intertwined and interconnected. In sight of the abovementioned framework, the analysis shown in this paper focuses on the Italian data set.

The one without the keys: A humanistic psychologist’s evidence-based reflections of being “on the other side”.

The one without the keys: A humanistic psychologist’s evidence-based reflections of being “on the other side”.

Using Writing Portfolios to Assess Course Learning Outcomes in a Jordanian University

Portfolios were used to assess cognitive and affective course learning outcomes in an undergraduate writing program at a private university in Jordan. A convenience sample of twenty-one male and female Arab EFL/ESL freshmen, wrote short weekly assignments over a fifteen-week semester, made regular diary entries about their writing and leisure reading, and wrote a short children's story. These were not graded but students received prompt feedback. At semester’s end, they collected their work in a portfolio and wrote a final evidence-based reflection, in which they analysed their strengths and weaknesses in writing. These portfolios were graded based on their inclusion of regularly submitted written work, evidence of their response to given feedback and their analysis of their progress in writing. Using qualitative data analysis based on the grounded theory method, students’ reflections were mined for rich data, concepts were labelled and emerging categories were identified. These codes were further analysed in more depth, using cognitive and affective taxonomies, which showed that the course outcomes had been met. Recommendations are made for greater use of portfolio assessment at tertiary level in Jordan.

Spaces of interdisciplinary in/congruity: the coming together of engineers and social scientists in planning for sustainable urban environments

ABSTRACT In the context of a globalised interdisciplinary moment, where boundary-crossing research collaborations are valorised, this paper considers encounters between multidisciplinary researchers. Presenting empirics and reflections from an international project where social scientists and engineers sought to collaborate, communicate and address complex challenges associated with sustainable urban development, we question a series of assumptions about interdisciplinary research. Importantly, we pause to consider the practical implications of doing this work. In particular, we draw attention to the spaces of interdisciplinarity, from the field to the lab and the meeting room, the role of researchers’ reflexivity and positionality, and the importance of being aware of the embodied, emotional realities of such work. In so doing, we call for more critical, evidence-based reflection upon the lived in/congruities of interdisciplinary practices.

Are we preparing for collaboration, advocacy and leadership? Targeted multi-site analysis of collaborative intrinsic roles implementation in medical undergraduate curricula

BackgroundThe Collaborator, Health Advocate and Leader/Manager roles are highly relevant for safe patient management and optimization of healthcare system in rehabilitation and prevention. They are defined in competency-based frameworks and incorporate competencies empowering physicians to master typical daily tasks in interdisciplinary, interprofessional and institutional collaboration. However, appropriate implementation of roles remains difficult in undergraduate medical education (UME) and needs to be closely monitored. The aim of this cross-institutional mapping study was to examine for the roles of Collaborator, Health Advocate and Leader/Manager: (1) To what extent do German UME programs explicitly meet the given standards after 5 years of study? (2) Which information may be obtained from multi-site mapping data for evidence-based reflection on curricula and framework?MethodsIn a joint project of eight German UME programs, 80 to 100% of courses were mapped from teachers’ perspective against given national standards: (sub-)competency coverage, competency level attainment and assessment. All faculties used a common tool and consented procedures for data collection and processing. The roles’ representation was characterized by the curricular weighting of each role content expressed by the percentage of courses referring to it (citations). Data were visualized in a benchmarking approach related to a general mean of the intrinsic roles as reference line.Results(Sub-)competencies of the Health Advocate are consistently well-integrated in curricula with a wide range of generally high curricular weightings. The Collaborator reveals average curricular representation, but also signs of ongoing curricular development in relevant parts and clear weaknesses regarding assessment and achieved outcomes. The Leader/Manager displays consistently lowest curricular weightings with several substantial deficiencies in curricular representation, constructive alignment and/or outcome level. Our data allow identifying challenges to be considered by local curriculum developers or framework reviewers (e.g. non-achievement of competency levels, potential underrepresentation, lacking constructive alignment).ConclusionOur non-normative, process-related benchmarking approach provides a differentiated crosscut snapshot to compare programs in the field of others, thus revealing shortcomings in role implementation, especially for Leader/Manager and Collaborator. The synopsis of multi-site data may serve as an external reference for program self-assessment and goal-oriented curriculum development. It may also provide practical data for framework review.

Regulating the Dynamic Concept of Non-Personal Data in the EU:

The article explores the dynamic concept of non-personal data and the regulatory approaches within the EU legal framework. De lege lata, this article critically assesses the issues arising from Regulation (EU) 2018/1807 on the framework on the free flow of non-personal data, focusing on the definition of non-personal data and the data porting principle. While the legislator’s shift from ownership to control is endorsed, the relevance of a framework targeting solely non-personal data is questioned in light of data protection concerns. De lege ferenda, this article submits that a comprehensive approach should broadly consider overcoming binary data categorisations. For the purposes of the FFD Regulation’s evaluation, evidence-based reflections are suggested. Keywords: non-personal data; free flow of data; GDPR; data portability; data ownership

Space Syntax's Relation to Seating Choices from an Evolutionary Approach

Space syntax provides information on the probabilities of certain behaviour types (e.g., seating choice, movement) depending on the configuration of space. The evolutionary approach (e.g. Appleton’s prospect-refuge theory) in environmental psychology can help designers in creating spaces by providing a better understanding why certain parts of an open space or a building are avoided or occupied, why good "observation points" or "hiding places” are preferred. Our research aimed to explore how different space syntax variables predict specific behaviours – the seating choices of 216 participants – in a 3D virtual model of a lounge area and how the prospect-refuge theory relates to these predictions. The participants had to choose a seat in simulated spaces in two social situations, which differed in the degree of focused work and concentration: one of the situations implied seeing others and being seen, while the other highlighted focused work and hiding. The results show that there was a variation in the seating choices depending on the goal of the situation (user: trying to be seen or hiding). The expected significant correlations with the space syntax measurements were presented in the situations where being seen was the goal of the participants. However, in the situations where hiding was induced, our results need further clarification. Our future goal is to provide quantitative, evidence-based reflection on the prospect-refuge and space syntax theories, and to investigate the psychological factors (e.g., goal of the user) that need further consideration when applying these theories in the design practice.

Dynamics of Reflective Assessment and Knowledge Building for Academically Low-Achieving Students

This study investigates designs for developing knowledge building (KB) and higher order competencies among academically low-achieving students. Thirty-seven low-achieving students from a ninth-grade visual arts course in Hong Kong participated. The design involved principle-based KB pedagogy, with students writing on Knowledge Forum® (KF), enriched by analytics-supported reflective assessment. Analysis of the discourse on KF showed that the low achievers were able to engage in productive discourse, with evidence of metacognitive, collaborative, and epistemic inquiry. Analysis illustrates how the design supported student engagement, including (1) reflective inquiry and social metacognition; (2) reflective meta- and epistemic talk; (3) evidence-based reflection for collective growth; and (4) reflection embedded in community ethos. Implications of reflective assessment for supporting low achievers for inquiry learning and KB are discussed.

Mediating household energy transitions through co-design in urban Kenya, Uganda and South Africa

Approaches to providing sustainable energy in cities have generated considerable interest in academic and policy circles. The development of this body of work, however, has not shed much light on the modes of intermediation that are needed to reconfigure urban energy systems towards sustainability in energy-poor countries. This paper focuses on the role of academics as knowledge intermediaries who can trigger cross-sector collaborations around innovations for a sustainable energy transition in African cities. The research presented here was generated by an interdisciplinary research team made up of partners in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa. The research partners set out to better understand how sustainable energy transitions can be achieved through collaborative efforts between community members, experts and policy actors in the three countries. This paper provides evidence-based reflections on how the research partners used participatory methods to facilitate solution co-design and knowledge co-production over a period of two years under the Leading Integrated Research for Agenda 2030 in Africa (LIRA 2030) program. A key knowledge outcome of the research partnership is an improved understanding of how transdisciplinary research across the sub-region can be used to unearth the socio-spatial, cultural and political dimensions of energy in relation to other urban services such as health and housing. Based on this understanding, the paper proposes transdisciplinary co-design as a promising approach to providing sustainable energy in urban informal settlements in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Childhood Obesity Prevention: Does Policy Meet Research? Evidence-Based Reflections upon the Spanish Case

Childhood Obesity Prevention: Does Policy Meet Research? Evidence-Based Reflections upon the Spanish Case

Value chain development in Nicaragua: prevailing approaches and tools used for design and implementation

This article draws on four contrasting cases of value chain development (VCD) in Nicaragua to assess approaches and tools used in design and implementation. We interviewed 28 representatives from the international NGOs leading the interventions, the local NGOs that participated in implementation, principal buyers, and cooperatives. Despite the complexity of market systems, results showed a relatively basic approach to VCD, reflected in: 1) reliance on a single tool for design and implementation; 2) expected outcomes based on technical assistance and training for smallholders and cooperatives; 3) local NGOs and cooperatives with key roles in implementation; and 4) limited engagement with other chain actors, service providers, and researchers. We conclude with a call for a broader approach to VCD, based on a combination of tools to account for multiple, context-specific needs of diverse stakeholders, deeper collaboration between key actors within and outside the value chain, and evidence-based reflection and learning.

Adding value to education for sustainability in Africa with inquiry-based approaches in open and distance learning

Purpose – Inquiry-based approaches can potentially enrich sustainability learning in any educational context, more so in open and distance learning (ODL – perceived as theoretically inclined) and in regions of educational need (such as the Global South, of which Africa forms part). The purpose of this paper is to map the benefits and challenges of using inquiry-based learning (IBL), with reference to ODL and the value added by IBL in terms of education for sustainability (EfS) in Africa. Design/methodology/approach – Evidence-based reflection is used to provide a narrative assessment of the experience gained with IBL in two undergraduate sustainability-focussed modules in the Department of Geography at the University of South Africa (Unisa), an ODL provider in Africa and the Global South. Findings – Consideration of enabling and limiting factors indicates that although constraints are experienced, adoption of IBL approaches holds potential as pedagogic for EfS in Africa, due to grounding of learning in theory and applied to local places/contexts. This indicates a role for IBL to change perceptions regarding the lack of practical utility of ODL. Originality/value – Implementing place-based and contextual IBL is innovative in ODL. It adds value to learning experiences and supports transformative learning, both important components of EfS and addressing a need in the African context. Practitioners will find the experience gained with implementation of IBL, coupled with possibilities associated with information and communication technologies, of value.

With a little help from our friends: An empirical investigation of co-authoring in accounting research

The rising incidence of co-authorship in academia generally is well documented. Research collaboration has been argued to bring some specific benefits to researchers, yet the process and outcomes of collaboration is not without its risks and challenges. The crucial decision to collaborate has both short and long-term implications for the research agenda of most academics, yet relatively little evidence-based reflection on co-authorship is to be found in either the general academic or accounting literature. The aim of this paper is therefore to provide foundational insights into accounting journal article co-authorship, including the diversity and commonality of its processes, and their conditioning contexts. Based on interviews with 76 academics from 67 universities in the US, UK, mainland Europe and Australasia, who, in the 2011 calendar year, published their research in seven internationally esteemed accounting research journals, our findings point to productivity or social predilections of researchers driving their decision to co-author, as well as in their evaluation of the benefits and costs they have experienced in co-authoring. Interpreted from the vantage point of Social Exchange Theory, these findings lead to a broad classification of co-authorship styles, each with implications for both early career researchers as well as more experienced academics, in terms of the propensity to foster more satisfactory working relationships, and effectiveness of research outcomes.

Child protection in development: Evidence-based reflections & questions for practitioners

Child protection in development: Evidence-based reflections & questions for practitioners

Doing reflective practice: a data-led way forward:

This article makes the case for an approach to reflective practice (RP) that is both evidence-based and data-led. We argue that, while RP within the field of TESOL enjoys a relatively high level of acceptance and status (perhaps even an orthodoxy), it has little corresponding knowledge base that demonstrates how RP ‘gets done’. We propose a need for more concrete descriptions of RP in order for teachers and teacher educators to fully engage with its possibilities, and in order to establish a knowledge base for promoting and supporting research by and for practitioners. In this article, we focus on the approaches that might be adopted to promote data-led and evidence-based reflection. Such a data-led approach would encourage the use of professional data, alongside appropriate tools (presented below) as a means of aiding and promoting practitioner reflection. In the first part of the article, we briefly outline what we consider to be some of the main challenges facing RP; in the second, we put forward a number of tools and procedures for enhancing RP and making it collaborative, data-led, and evidence-based.