Does your coursework Masters program satisfy the research requirements of AQF9? National symposium about developing research skills in coursework Masters, 23 September 2015, Adelaide

The Symposium is timely in Australia because we have a new requirement that all coursework Masters students:

“Apply knowledge and skills ..with high level personal autonomy and accountability… to plan and execute a substantial research based project, capstone experience and/or piece of scholarship”

Each coursework Masters degree needs to not only provide program structures to satisfy AQF9 requirements, but also the learning, teaching and assessment/feedback tasks that will develop professionally-relevant research capacity for all students, to answer the question:

Assessing the Research Requirements of Coursework Masters (AQF9): Webinar Tuesday 1st September 12.15-12.45 pm EST

If you are concerned about how to assess student research processes and products in Coursework Masters, come to our next webinar:
1 Sept: Research Skill Development & Assessment in coursework Masters (12.15pm EST, 11.45am-12.15pm CST, 10.15-10.45am WA)

It will be run by colleagues from CSU, UTS and USyd, who have been using the Research Skill Development (RSD) framework to inform Masters-level formative and summative assessment.

To enter the virtual classroom, go to tiny.cc/mxao0x

Log in as ‘guest’ with your name. If you have a headset, please use this.

Our final webinar in the build-up to the Masterly RSD symposium will be on:
15 September: Work Integrated Learning for Masters, informed by the Work Skill Development framework (1.00 pm EST).

To see RSD-based resources developed for coursework Masters, go to www.rsd.edu.au/masters

Hope to see you in the virtual classroom.

John

Building Capacity for Work-Readiness: Bridging the Cognitive and Affective Domains

Suniti Bandaranaike, James Cook University, Australia and I just had an article published that focuses on an analysis of students’ and employers’ perspectives during work placement, especially on student emotional work readiness. The article is titled: Building capacity for work-readiness: Bridging the cognitive and affective domains.

The article was published in a special issue of the Asia Pacific Journal of Cooperative Education, 2015,16(3), 223-233 and is available from this link:

http://www.apjce.org/files/APJCE_16_3_223_233.pdf

The work builds on the Work Skill Development (WSD) framework, which is a sister framework of the Research Skill Development framework. We are currently exploring how to manage the connections and segue between explicit research skill development and work skill development. The idea is that students do not experience a disconnect between the world of work and the world of university, but rather see them sharing similar cognitive and affective skill sets that use different terminologies and different emphases.

Suniti summarises the article:

Work-readiness capacity is a function of both the delivery of tertiary courses and the accompanying assessment standards. Work-readiness delivered through placements/internships often focus on cognitive skills and knowledge with little emphasis on emotional skills and affective knowledge. This study therefore, looks at empirical evidence of work-readiness of students through their learning experiences and their understanding of both the cognitive and the affective domains. The research is based on a validated employability framework, the Work Skills Development framework (Bandaranaike & Willison, 2009), which was used to assess core employability competencies and performance levels of 138 multidisciplinary WIL students and gain feedback from 111 employers. Statistical analysis was used to compare variations in the application of cognitive and affective skills and tested across gender, age, discipline and previous work experience. The study concluded that whilst overall students had limited understanding of affective skills, employers’ emphasised the need for greater use of affective skills in the workplace. In order to unlock the potential of the cognitive skills and for a deeper understanding of affective skills by students, this research introduces the concept of Emotional Work-readiness [EW] as a pathway for building work-readiness capacity.

How important do you think understanding the emotional aspects of work is for students on workplacements?

John