Context: Mentoring is a beneficial mechanism to support junior faculty members as they navigate job expectations, institutional nuances, and the professional landscape during the first few years as a faculty member. Whereas effective characteristics of informal mentoring relationships are generally understood, less is known about factors that…

Assessing student learning in university courses is commonly done using a rubric that arranges the assessment criteria and standards descriptors in a matrix style or grid format. This paper introduces an alternative style of grading tool known as the continua model of a guide to making judgements, which arranges assessment criteria based on a…

Recent years have seen increasing awareness of the wide range of mental health problems faced by students. Gatekeeper training has been shown to have a positive impact on knowledge and attitudes about suicide prevention, although the evidence for skills acquisition is limited. We utilised the STORM® training package in an exploratory study to…

In order to serve its nontraditional students, a university piloted a competency-based program as alternative method for its students to earn college credit. The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to conduct a summative program evaluation to determine if the program was successful in order to make decisions about program revision and…

In this article we report on the results of a pilot study on the use of task-based multilingual and multicultural professional scenarios for higher education teachers and learners at BA and MA level. The scenarios reflect new learning outcomes and assessment criteria for the presently under-conceptualised domain of communication in multilingual…

This paper describes the research process undertaken in a pilot study conducted at the University of South Australia's Centre for Regional Engagement (CRE), and reports the feedback collected in relation to this process and the project overall. Academic staff and students from CRE's two sites located in the rural and regional cities of Whyalla and…

Which academics benefit from participation in formal mentoring programmes? This study examined the needs and mentoring networks of new academics with evaluative data from a pilot mentoring programme. Themes from these data point towards re-envisioning initiatives for academic staff development. First, an examination of the expansion of mentoring…

This dissertation offers a case study of the YMCA of the USA's pilot Higher Education Service Project (YHESP) with 61 local YMCAs on how the collaborative evaluation approach functioned to facilitate an organizational culture around evaluation and reinvention strategies of YMCAs as college access service providers. Multiple data collection sources…

A small number of undergraduate business schools have made significant changes to their curriculum to deliver a team-taught, cross-functional undergraduate core. The author examines an exemplary early-adopting program to better understand the long-term impact such a change has had on the overall organization, and to seek insights on implementation…

Partial fraction decomposition is a useful technique often taught at senior secondary or undergraduate levels to handle integrations, inverse Laplace transforms or linear ordinary differential equations, etc. In recent years, an improved Heaviside's approach to partial fraction decomposition was introduced and developed by the author. An important…

The study reported here, one part of a larger study on doctoral education, describes a pilot study that used Activity Theory to shape a methodological tool for better understanding the tensions inherent in the doctoral experience. As doctoral students may function within a range of activity systems, we designed data collection protocols based on…

Since 2008, Outcome-Based Learning (OBL), a student-centred strategy aiming to enhance the quality of teaching and learning, has been launched as a major initiative among higher education institutions in Hong Kong. When adopting OBL at course level, other than designing the OBL framework, it is also very important to evaluate the effectiveness of…

This article presents three studies that provide an in-depth examination of STEM-related supports and barriers. These studies constructed an instrument to identify male and female perceptions of the barriers and supports for pursuing coursework and/or careers in mathematics and sciences domains; to pilot test and refine that instrument; and then…

These proceedings contain the papers of the 13th International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2016), October 28-30, 2016, which has been organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS), co-organized by the University of Mannheim, Germany, and endorsed by the…

The pilot research project reported on here was conducted between October 2005 and March 2006 on one campus of one of Ontario's 24 colleges. The college is located in an urban centre in southern Ontario. The main focus of this pilot study was the exploration of issues of accessibility and accommodation for students with disabilities as they engage…