Written feedback represents a powerful point of contact between higher education staff and learners. In an increasingly mass and consumer-oriented HE landscape, it has the potential to offer individualised support and scope for negotiation of the roles of expert/novice. However, despite the centrality of this form of feedback, student and teacher satisfaction with written feedback remains…
The provision of group working opportunities has become an increasingly important facet of higher education curriculum design, not least at York. Group working provides students with the chance to engage in collaborative and cooperative learning. By interacting with their peers around specific questions or problems, students are not only able to develop key subject knowledge…
The internationalisation of higher education generally focuses on the mobility of staff and students and on extending the reach of universities’ networks, research and reputation beyond the UK. The University of York internationalisation strategy also points to the international experience of all students and aims to improve integration between students of diverse cultural backgrounds, encouraging…
The expansion of higher education, together with the introduction of key disability legislation, has made it incumbent upon universities to ensure that their curricula, the teaching methods they employ and the expectations they have of student learning, do not unfairly discriminate against any particular student or group of students. In the UK, a common terminology…
There have been two interestingly contradictory trends feeding into Technology Enhanced Learning debates in recent years. Firstly, that the traditional lecture is dead; an obsolete mode of teaching whereby an expert imparts their knowledge and wisdom to the passively attentive novice, a model no longer suited to the fast pace of change in the modern…
As has been explored in previous SoTL seminars, the notion of a deep learning approach is more often than not seen as positive thing in that it describes intrinsically motivated strategies to understand material and to see the connections interlinking concepts and ideas. The pervasive presence of deep learning in higher education discourse has been…
“Critical thinking appears in university curricula, course outlines, and statements of graduate attributes, and yet there is both uncertainty about what it entails and passionate debate about its essential nature.” (Jones, p.169) Looking through lists of programme learning outcomes, one word often comes to the fore: ‘critical’. Across the full range of subject areas, from…
“…teaching was not a job like any other job, but a crucial site of struggle.” (Giroux, p.160) Life in Higher Education gets tougher every day: resources are low, our authority is undermined, and the pile of marking only gets bigger. As will become clear in the reading for our next SoTL session, Henry Giroux understands…
Higher Education in the UK is catching on to a phenomenon that has preoccupied US Higher Education research for some time – assessment of the impact of tertiary study on progression in student learning. More specifically, what is the learning gain, or the ‘value added dividend’, for a student if they decided to invest in…
It may sometimes feel – and be the case – that the nature and structure of modern higher education leads students to focus upon performance, and that we dedicate ourselves to teaching in ways that are designed, at least in part, to eventuate in short-term student achievement. We, therefore, spend time finding ways to allow…
How would you define what an essay is? Do disciplinary essays share sufficient characteristics to warrant the common name for this type of assessed writing? How would you define the writing style and standard expected of students producing a report for laboratory work or projects in the Physical Sciences or Mathematics? What are we asking…
Why do some students get stuck on particular disciplinary concepts? Why is it that this difficulty is sometimes encountered when the concepts seem perfectly straightforward to us as their teachers, or when other students in the same cohort grasp them with ease? Investigating this question in the context of an ESRC funded project on Enhancing…
