British Educational Research Association Annual Conference

Facilitating reflective learning in higher education

Interestingly, the action learning handbook that you really wait for now is coming. It's significant to wait for the representative and beneficial books to read. Every book that is provided in better way and utterance will be expected by many peoples. Even you are a good reader or not, feeling to read this book will always appear when you find it. But, when you feel hard to find it as yours, what to do? Borrow to your friends and don't know when to give back it to her or him.

The action learning handbook

Education as Initiation

Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported online in Journal of Educational Psychology on Sep 3 2018 (see record 2018-43394-001). In the article, there is an error in Table 7 which contained a production-related error. Overall N was listed as “1,9,319” when it should be “159,319.” All versions of this article have been corrected. Please see erratum for full description.] Epistemic cognition, defined as the ways that people acquire, justify, and use knowledge, has been a prominent area of scholarship in educational psychology for nearly 50 years. Researchers have argued that epistemic cognition is a key predictor of many 21st century learning outcomes including critical thinking, scientific literacy, and historical thinking, among others. Despite a large volume of quantitative empirical research on epistemic cognition and academic achievement, there has been no published systematic analysis of this literature. We conducted a meta-analysis of 132 nonexperimental studies in this literature, and found epistemic cognition, as measured predominantly in terms of beliefs, was positively correlated with academic achievement, r = .162, p < .001, indicating a small but meaningful relationship. Moderator analyses revealed models and instruments focusing on development and justification of knowledge had higher correlations with academic achievement than those focused on constructs related to authority. We found evidence supporting domain-general, domain-specific, and topic-specific conceptualizations of epistemic cognition, and stronger correlations when the specificity of the epistemic cognition measure matched the specificity of the achievement measure. Conceptual knowledge and argumentation performance were more strongly associated with epistemic cognition than declarative or procedural knowledge performance. Finally, we found epistemic cognition predicted academic achievement from elementary school through graduate school, suggesting the importance of studying epistemic cognition across all educational levels. These findings have direct implications for honing epistemic cognition theory, creating better measures of epistemic cognition, and developing effective educational interventions on this critical topic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)

A Meta-Analytic Review of the Relationship between Epistemic Cognition and Academic Achievement.

The right of parents to withdraw children from RE was conceived as a protection for the rights of religious minorities at a time when Religious Instruction in the community school was of a Christia...

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The right of withdrawal from religious education in England: school leaders’ beliefs, experiences and understandings of policy and practice

Previous studies have suggested that a student’s personal epistemological beliefs can be a predictor of their academic performance The current research aimed to extend this work by exploring whether the disciplinary epistemological beliefs presented to students in their classes and assessments might mediate the relationship between students’ personal epistemological beliefs and performance A comparison of a student’s personal epistemological beliefs with the epistemological beliefs presented in their classes and assignments was carried out, establishing the level of ‘epistemic match’ between student and discipline It was expected that epistemic match would be a predictor of a student’s performance A total of 362 first year students from eight subject disciplines at a UK university completed a questionnaire measure of personal epistemological beliefs A total of 38 staff from the same disciplines also completed a questionnaire which was adapted from the original student version to represent a measure o

Epistemic Match: A Pedagogical Concept for Understanding How Students Fit into the Chosen Subject.

Many contemporary analyses criticise metrics-based evaluation in the higher education context as a neoliberal technology, notwithstanding the different national contexts and organisational topographies in which metrics are used. This Anglo-German study offers a comparative exploration of the role of metrics in two contrasting cases: highly developed, state-driven sectoral use of metrics in England, and more dispersed, decentralised use of metrics in Germany, in the case of research particularly. This survey-based study examines academics’ perceptions of fairness of accountability practices associated with metrics-based evaluations at the organisational level. Drawing on organisational justice theory, the analysis focuses on the extent that academic evaluations of fairness are underpinned by contextual evaluations linked to organisational practices or more abstract evaluations of these measures. In the English context, fairness evaluations were more related to organisational uses of metrics. In the German context, negative justice evaluations do not seem closely associated with organisational factors but relate to a cultural critique of metrics. The analysis demonstrates that academics may hold views on metrics which are contingent not only on their perceived accuracy as measures but also on their perceived efficacy as tools which support broader sectoral and organisational developments, such that metrics start to lead their own life in organisational contexts. The comparative dimension to the study suggests that in some cases, context-sensitive use of metrics can enable emancipation from informal power networks in academia.

English and German academics’ perspectives on metrics in higher education: evaluating dimensions of fairness and organisational justice

This paper explores the processes and outcomes of an action research project, which utilised action learning sets to explore the experiences of a community of academics, who promote pedagogical enh...

Action Learning: How Can It Contribute to a Collaborative Process of Pedagogical Action Research?.

The research literature emphasises the emergence – in the English context particularly – of performative accountabilities associated with metrics-based evaluation. Recent studies observe un...

Cathal O’Siochru

Papers

The right of withdrawal from religious education in England: school leaders’ beliefs, experiences and understandings of policy and practice

Epistemic Match: A Pedagogical Concept for Understanding How Students Fit into the Chosen Subject.

English and German academics’ perspectives on metrics in higher education: evaluating dimensions of fairness and organisational justice

Action Learning: How Can It Contribute to a Collaborative Process of Pedagogical Action Research?.

Academic perspectives on metrics: procedural justice as a key factor in evaluations of fairness