CRADLE 2019 publications round-up – Part 2: Professional and workplace contexts / Research practice

10 December 2019

As 2019 draws to a close, we asked the CRADLE team to look over their impressive list of publications for the year and pick some highlights for a special four-part publication round-up. Today – if you’re looking for new perspectives or some inspiration around professional and workplace contexts or your research practice, read on! And if you want more great holiday reads, why not check out our full 2019 publications round-up?

Part 1: Assessment / Evaluative judgement
Part 3: Student experiences / Contract cheating
Part 4: Feedback

Professional and workplace contexts

Toward a pedagogy for professional noticing: Learning through observation
D. Rooney and D. Boud (2019) Vocations and Learning, 12(3), pp. 441-457.
The core of all professional courses is developing students’ capacity to notice what is important in any professional encounter and act accordingly. This paper suggests that learning to notice has been downplayed in our courses, and we need to devise teaching and learning strategies to enable students to recognise what is salient within courses, simulations and the workplace.

Shadow systems in assessment: How supervisors make progress decisions in practice
D. Castanelli^‡, E. Molloy, J. Weller and M. Bearman (2019) Advances in Health Science Education.
This study explores workplace assessment, within the context of programmatic assessment in anaesthesia training. It reveals that the formal systems – with structured points of data collection and decision-making – operate alongside a ‘shadow system’, whereby those responsible for making decisions about trainee progress conduct their own processes alongside and almost invisible to the official processes. This paper reveals the complexity of assessment in the workplace and probes how we can reconcile workplace learning with formal systems of assessment.

Aligning assessment with the needs of work-integrated learning: The challenges of authentic assessment in a complex context
R. Ajjawi, J. Tai, N. Tran, D. Boud, L. Johnson and C.-J. Patrick (2019) Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education.
In this ACEN-funded study, we asked how students experience alignment between learning and assessment in work placements and the influence of this on students’ perceptions of authenticity. We identified three key misalignments which interrupted authenticity. We reconceptualise these misalignments as missed learning opportunities and recommend that assessment work to coordinate students, industry and university needs.

Research practice

Eliciting rich data: A practical approach to writing semi-structured interview schedules
M. Bearman (2019) Focus on Health Professional Education, 20(3).
This very practical paper provides a guide on ‘how to’ write an interview schedule for research purposes. It focuses on how asking the right questions can generate rich experiential data, in line with the research focus.

^‡ CRADLE Doctoral Student