Group counselling conversations about fear of assessment
- Authors: Havenga , K.
- Date: 2017
- Subjects: Evaluation , Group counseling
- Language: English
- Type: Masters (Thesis)
- Identifier: http://ujcontent.uj.ac.za8080/10210/385741 , http://hdl.handle.net/10210/270310 , uj:28729
- Description: M.Ed. (Educational Psychology) , Abstract: Time of academic assessment can bring about high levels of stress and anxiety which could have an impact on the performance of students. This can mostly be attributed to the fear appeal messages used by faculty and educational management, as a form of prevention of failure or encouragement, but which ultimately leads to an increase of the level of anxiety experienced by the student and lead to fear of assessment. Research has indicated how peers influence the construction of meaning (Leal, 1992) and how knowledge can be gained, changed and reconstructed through social interaction (Leal, 1992). The negotiation of new meaning can be achieved through interaction and talking with peers. This study aims to investigate how the theories of peer interaction and collaborative learning can be utilised and applied in a group counselling conversation, for the purpose of creating new understanding or changed understanding. The focus of the study is the use of talk to share an understanding of the fear of assessment. An interpretivist qualitative paradigm within and ethnomethodological research design was followed for this study. This allowed the researcher to provide a detailed report and discussion of data that was captured within a natural setting, observing and recording the actions of the participants. Data was collected through a video-recording of a solution-focused brief counselling session. A verbatim transcription of this recording was analysed on Clayman and Gill’s four levels of Conversational Analysis. The findings of this study indicated that group counselling conversations do not follow a predetermined organisational sequence. This would be expected from SFBT as the participants play an equal role in the control of the session and creation of meaning. The interruptions and overlap of talk in this study positively contributed to the conversation as it served to enhance the level of agreement, acknowledgement, and...
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Course evaluation for low pass rate improvement in Engineering education
- Authors: Ouahada, Khmaies
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Education , Engineering , Evaluation
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/404695 , uj:33951 , Ouahada, K. 2019: Course evaluation for low pass rate improvement in Engineering education.
- Description: Abstract : A course evaluation is a process that includes evaluations of lecturers’ teaching performances and their course material moderations. These two procedures are usually implemented, whether officially by the faculty of engineering or by lecturers’ own initiatives, to help identify lecturers’ strengths and weaknesses and the ways forward to improve their performances and their qualities of teaching. This paper presents different ways of implementing these two criteria from students’ and professionals’ perspectives. Official questionnaires from the faculty of engineering, personal questionnaires using Google surveys, Moodle and special designed forms have been used for moderation and evaluations. The process of evaluation is the core of a feedback procedure followed by universities in order for them to monitor the teaching quality of their staff. Satisfactory results show that such a process can improve the lecturers’ teaching performances, courses material quality, students’ satisfaction and performances, and finally the pass rate of the class.
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Which academic search systems are suitable for systematic reviews or meta-analyses? Evaluating retrieval qualities of Google Scholar, PubMed, and 26 other resources
- Authors: Gusenbauer, Michael , Haddaway, Neal R.
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Academic search systems , Discovery , Evaluation
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/407668 , uj:34324 , Citation: Gusenbauer, M., Haddaway, N.R. 2019: Which academic search systems are suitable for systematic reviews or meta-analyses? Evaluating retrieval qualities of Google Scholar, PubMed, and 26 other resources. https://doi.org/10.1002/jrsm.1378.
- Description: Abstract: Rigorous evidence identification is essential for systematic reviews and meta- analyses (evidence syntheses) because the sample selection of relevant studies determines a review's outcome, validity, and explanatory power. Yet, the sea- rch systems allowing access to this evidence provide varying levels of precision, recall, and reproducibility and also demand different levels of effort. To date, it remains unclear which search systems are most appropriate for evidence syn- thesis and why. Advice on which search engines and bibliographic databases to choose for systematic searches is limited and lacking systematic, empirical performance assessments. This study investigates and compares the systematic search qualities of 28 widely used academic search systems, including Google Scholar, PubMed, and Web of Science. A novel, query-based method tests how well users are able to interact and retrieve records with each system. The study is the first to show the extent to which search systems can effectively and effi- ciently perform (Boolean) searches with regards to precision, recall, and repro- ducibility. We found substantial differences in the performance of search systems, meaning that their usability in systematic searches varies. Indeed, only half of the search systems analyzed and only a few Open Access databases can be recommended for evidence syntheses without adding substantial caveats. Particularly, our findings demonstrate why Google Scholar is inappro- priate as principal search system. We call for database owners to recognize the requirements of evidence synthesis and for academic journals to reassess qual- ity requirements for systematic reviews. Our findings aim to support researchers in conducting better searches for better evidence synthesis.
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