This paper will review the existing student voice work in higher education and critique its current weaknesses, particularly in relation to conceptualisations of and commitments to participation, transformation and empowerment. It will be argued that the employment of participatory methods in higher education student voice work offers a way to…

Higher education institutions across Europe are currently involved in a major process of reforming and restructuring as part of the Bologna process which stresses the role of competences and outcomes in curriculum design. This paper reports on the findings of a research project whose purpose was to assess the clarity and the appropriate…

Mentoring is believed to be one of the most influential factors in US efforts to encourage college-aged students to seek careers in science, yet the role that mentoring plays in this process has not been elucidated. The researchers were interested in understanding whether the long-held beliefs about the importance of mentoring would be revealed as…

As students progress towards their PhD degrees, they will become more independent and practitioner-like; for those moving into academia, it is often assumed the programs of their PhD mentors will serve as prototypes for their own successful research programs. However, the author's research program as an Assistant Professor led him in directions…

Increasingly in recent years, the involvement of disabled people as co-researchers has been regarded as "good practice." This has been informed by growing participatory and emancipatory research paradigms as well as user-focused policy imperatives. The benefits of these shifts apply to the research itself (improved definition, direction,…

Western Governors University (WGU) is a competency-based institution that uses an integrated and holistic approach to competence definition, teaching, and assessment. Building a competency-based degree program begins with competence definition activities that focus on what successful graduates need to be able to "do" and the related…

"Improving Your Reflective Practice through Stories of Practitioner Research" shows how research has informed and created effective and valuable reflective practice in early years education, and offers depth to the arguments for a research-orientated stance to this vital field of study. This thought-provoking text explores and documents a variety…

Transforming Writing is a two-year action research project which aims to develop a model for the teaching and learning of writing that more fully incorporates a focus on embedded formative assessment. In the first year of the project, the 12 participating schools developed a model of writing underpinned by Talk for Writing, an approach developed…

Googlitis, the overreliance on search engines for research and the resulting development of poor searching skills, is a recognized problem among today's students. Google is not an effective research tool because, in addition to encouraging keyword searching at the expense of more powerful subject searching, it only accesses the Surface Web and is…

The action research project entitled "Engaging pre-service TESOL teachers in authentic workplace learning" aimed to enhance the TESOL practicum experience of pre-service teachers in the Graduate Diploma of Education at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia. Integrated into the relevant TESOL curriculum unit was the…

For many years now E-learning researchers have been discussing the use of laptops in educational settings. The One Laptop per Child project, (OLPC project), has been used in developing countries since the year 2002 to avoid the increase of the digital divide between those with ready access to technology and those with limited access. Austria has…

One of the outcomes of the policy emphasis upon skills formation in countries like Australia and the UK has been an increase in cross-disciplinary structured programs for higher research degrees raising implicit, but often unexamined, questions about the curriculum and expertise that should inform them. Key insights from applied linguistics and…

Educational research in cooperative learning suggests that inequity based on perceived status may be an issue with heterogeneous cooperative learning groups. This paper explores issues of status based on race, ethnicity and cultural background in the New Zealand tertiary classroom where there is a diverse mix of domestic and international…

More than two decades of debate since the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) adopted the term information literacy have been marked by ongoing criticism of its associated definitions and standards. Some scholars and practitioners have argued for a critical information literacy, which applies the precepts of critical pedagogy to…

In 2005, the Library at UNSW began a comprehensive restructuring process that fundamentally changed the provision of services to its academic community. A primary aim of this process was to increase flexibility of service development and delivery and so to improve research support. The motivation for reformed services arose from considerations…