Jill Scott

Development of the Transferable Learning Orientations Tool: Providing Metacognitive Opportunities and Meaningful Feedback for Students and Instructors.

This study encapsulates the development and testing of the Transferable Learning Orientations (TLO) tool. It is a triangulated measure built on select scales from the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ), together with multiple-choice items adapted from the lifelong learning VALUE rubric, and an open-ended response for each dimension. Select scales from the MSLQ were tested in a range of undergraduate courses, and the TLO (version one) was developed and piloted in a first-year engineering course. Minor refinements were made, and the TLO (version two) was retested with second-year undergraduates. The TLO is designed to engage students in meta-cognitive processes and provide meaningful feedback to students. The dimensions are outcome motivation, learning belief, self-efficacy, transfer and organisation. Results from the second-year group were more consistent and reliable than the first-year group, suggesting that context is an important factor. The scales demonstrate acceptable reliability, and the moderate correlations between scale scores and rubric ratings provide support for concurrent validity. We recommend the TLO be tested with broader populations to confirm psychometric properties and that it be implemented longitudinally to investigate the development of learning skills and changes in orientations over time.

Mobilizing Knowledge: Re-visioning Research Dissemination, or Don't Yell at the TV – Be on TV

Do you ever find yourself yelling at the TV? Do you open the newspaper and start shouting at your kid or your cat? Do you sometimes just get up on your imaginary soapbox and start to rant? I thought only old men yelled at the TV. Then one day, I started going on a tirade during the evening news. My family thought I had an anger management problem. Maybe I do. Then I realized that I was suffering from Knowledge Stagnation Syndrome, a well-documented condition, whereby academics with decades of high-level training and specialized knowledge in several fields are deprived of opportunities to impart their opinions on current events and public discourse. Have you ever worked for months to develop research for a conference paper only to have five people show up to your panel, two of whom are your friends? Have you ever worked five or even ten years on a book to have it sell only a few hundred copies, all of which went to university libraries? Have you ever developed courses and researched vast amounts of material only to find that you can teach that course only once and then perhaps to only a handful of students? These are the sources of frustration that lead to Knowledge Stagnation Syndrome. All joking aside, in what follows I will outline my own journey from yelling at the TV to being on TV and how it has transformed my thinking about what research is, why we do it, and whom it benefits. I will discuss some important institutional challenges to the “mobilization-turn” that is upon us and make the case that humanities disciplines have an important role to play in research dissemination. (Vocabulary note: For the purposes of this paper, TV is a stand-in for any news outlet, from mainstream media such as radio, newspaper, television to the multiple platforms in the blogosphere, Twitter, Tumbler, Facebook, etc.)