This new paper from DER member Prof Michael Henderson reveals new insights into the factors that influence the tempation to cheat in large scale digital exams.

Discussions around assessment integrity often focus on the exam conditions and the motivations and values of those who cheated in comparison with those who did not. We argue that discourse needs to move away from a binary representation of cheating. Instead, we propose that the conversation may be more productive and more impactful by focusing on those who do not cheat, but who are tempted to do so. We conceptualise this group as being at risk of future cheating behaviour and potentially more receptive of targeted strategies to support their integrity decisions. In this paper we report on a large-scale survey of university students (n = 7,511) who had just completed one or more end of semester online exams. In doing so we explore students’ reported temptation to cheat. Analysis surrounding this “at risk” group reveals students who were Tempted (n = 1379) had significant differences from those who Cheated (n = 216) as well as those who were Not tempted (n = 5916). We focus on four research questions exploring whether there are specific online exam conditions, security settings, student attitudes or perceptions which are more strongly associated with the temptation to cheat. The paper offers insights to help institutions to minimise factors that might lead to breaches of assessment integrity, by focusing on the temptation to cheat during assessment.

Access the article here!

Citation: Henderson, M., Chung, J., Awdry, R. et al. The temptation to cheat in online exams: moving beyond the binary discourse of cheating and not cheating. International Journal of Educational Integrity 19, 21 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-023-00143-2

This new article by DER member Prof Michael Henderson reveals some of the productive as well as challenging practices surrounding PhD supervision feedback.

PhD candidates, like all students, learn through engaging with feedback. However, there is limited understanding of how feedback strategies support doctoral candidates. This qualitative framework synthesis of 86 papers analysed rich qualitative data about feedback within PhD supervision. Our synthesis, informed by sociomateriality and a dialogic, sense-making view of feedback, underscores the critical role that feedback plays in doctoral supervision. Supervisors, through their engagement or disengagement with feedback, controlled candidates’ access to tacit and explicit standards. The ephemeral and generative nature of verbal feedback dialogues contrasted with concrete textual comments. While many supervisors aimed for candidates to become less reliant on feedback over time, this did not necessarily translate to practice. Our findings suggest that balancing power dynamics might be achieved through focussing on feedback materials and practices rather than supervisor-candidate relationships.

Access the article here!

Citation: Bearman,M., Joanna, T., Henderson, M., Esterhazy, R., Mahoney, P., & Molloy, E. (2024). Enhancing feedback practices within PhD supervision: a qualitative framework synthesis of the literature. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/02602938.2024.2307332

New article in the Cambridge Journal of Education by DER members Luci Pangrazio, Neil Selwyn & Bronwyn Cumbo exploring student experiences of school datafication

ABSTRACT
The use of digital technologies within schools is leading to the increased generation, processing and circulation of data relating to students. To date, academic research around this ‘datafication’ of schools and schooling has tended to focus on institutional issues of governance and commercialisation, with relatively little consideration of students’ experiences. Drawing on focus group discussions with 62 students across three Australian secondary schools, the paper explores students’ experiences of school datafication in terms of power, surveillance and affect. It highlights students’ relatively constrained and distanced relations with school technology use, schools’ use of data to enforce student accountability and self-regulation of behaviour, as well students’ perceived powerlessness to engage agentically in digital practices. Drawing on notions of ‘digital resignation’ and ‘surveillance realism’, the paper concludes by considering the extent to which students might be supported to meaningfully engage with (and possibly resist) the constraining ‘atmospheres’ of datafication.
Luci Pangrazio, Neil Selwyn & Bronwyn Cumbo (2023) Tracking technology: exploring student experiences of school datafication, Cambridge Journal of Education, https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764X.2023.2215194

ASCILITE is the premier academic and practitioner conference in higher education digital technologies. This year was the first time DER members were able to attend for 3 years.

Prof Michael Henderson was awarded Life Member in 2021, but received it in person this year. Michael is the 16th awardee in the 37 years ofthe association. It is in recognition of sustained and outstanding service to the ASCILITE community, particularly in leadership around its scholarly direction and activities.

DER also congratulates Hua (Flora) Jin for her Best Paper award. Flora is a research student with our colleagues in COLAM, including DER member Yi-Shan Tsai. The paper on learning analytics and feedback can be read here.

Congratulations as well to Josephine Hook and team (includng DER member Prof Michael Henderson) for second place for the Poster awards. The poster builds on their chapter and explores the themes and implications surrouding Educational Design creative risk taking. You can read more about the chapter and see the poster here.

This chapter follows on, and builds upon, our 2020 JTATE article in which we proposed using Bruner’s (1996) frame of folk pedagogies to consider pedagogical approaches suited to synchronous digital online learning in pre-service teacher education in COVID-19 times.

In this chapter we revisit and add to Bruner’s folk pedagogical frame, pointing to implications for practice, including the need to design for learning that considers the nature of delivery with and through technologies. Through an autoethnographic exploration of our use of pedagogies in emerging hybrid learning environments within teacher education programs in 2022, we emphasize the use of asynchronous resources with synchronous learning and the facilitation of student agency..

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Citation:

Creely, E., Henriksen, D., & Henderson, M. (2022). Moving beyond folk pedagogies towards hybrid and blended practices: A reflection on teacher education post-pandemic. In E. Baumgartner, R. Kaplan-Rakowski, R.E. Ferdig, R. Hartshorne, & C. Mouza (Edits.), A Retrospective of teaching, technology, and teacher education during the COVID-19 pandemic (pp. 31-38). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/221522/.

This chapter focuses on the creative risk taking involved in educational design and is an exciting collaboration between DER member Prof Michael Henderson and 12 senior Educational Designers embedded centrally and within 9 Faculties.

Educational designers regularly engage in a process of creative risk taking. Inevitably, some designs result in degrees of failure, which need to be productively managed. Surprisingly, creative risk taking and productive failures are rarely discussed or studied in the field of educational design or educational technology.

Through the analysis of educational designer narratives we identified that there is a broad aversion to openly acknowledging the risks and failures. This was partly due to a drive for narratives of success by institutions and education in general, combined with the often precarious positions of the designers themselves who work in a “third space” beside and between educators and students and who therefore have to establish and sustain the trust of those who they work with.

In this chapter and our subsequent work we have identified seven strategies for educational designers and institutional leaders to promote changes in practice:

1. Normalize failure: acknowledge failures in every creative success; actively create time to reflect on practice as a habit; leaders at all levels to role model productive framing of failure.
2. Recognize the emotional labour of failure and vulnerability in engaging with it: acknowledge that it is hard to talk about failure; leaders need to show vulnerability and role model this too; embed emotional intelligence in reflective practice; recognize that educators are often in vulnerable positions as well, feeling at risk in revealing themselves to educational designers.
3. Involve others and resist internalising failure: include educators, students and other diverse perspectives in the design and reflection cycles; adopt or build a supportive community that engenders the sharing of vulnerability and candour.
4. Position failure as part of a process: adopt a designerly mindset – finding solutions is an ongoing cycle of design and redesign; define the role of educational design as a creative endeavour, in which failure is explicitly framed as a possibility.
5. Purposefully build trusting and candid relationships over time: encourage candour through adopting a welcoming and accepting approach to problems, needs and concerns.
6. Question the validity of success criteria: leaders at all levels need to be critical of measures of successful educational design such as grade outcomes and student satisfaction which are usually confounded with competing factors.
7. Revise the language surrounding the work of educational design: leaders need to frame the position descriptions, strategic directions and outcome expectations to include concepts of iteration, experimentation, trialling, prototyping and productive failure.

This study reveals that failure is both an inherent risk in creative educational design work, but failure can also be productive.

Below is a poster presentation of our research – offering the seven strategies themtically organised into three themes of strategic action: shaping expectations, redefining processes, and supporting people..

Citation:

Henderson, M., Abramson, P., Bangerter, M., Chen, M., D’Souza, I., Fulcher, J., Halupka, V., Hook, J., Horton, C., Macfarlan, B., Mackay, R., Nagy, K., Schliephake, K., Trebilco, J. & Vu, T. (2022). Educational design and productive failure: the need for a culture of creative risk taking. In Handbook of Digital Higher Education (pp. 14-25). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800888494.00011

New systematic literature review on instructional video design principles.

Authors: Matt Fyfield, with DER members Michael Henderson and Michael Phillips

The most common theoretical lens used to design and evaluate instructional videos has been to apply principles emerging from the cognitive theory of multimedia learning. However, these principles have been largely developed from research using instructional media other than videos. In addition, there is no comprehensive list of principles that have been shown to improve learning from instructional videos. Therefore, this paper seeks to identify principles of video design that are empirically supported in the literature.

This article provides useful guidance for instructional designers creating educational video content.

In addition to describing the breadth of research in the field, this paper also found that the development of the research field suffers from a lack of coherence and is in urgent need of clear nomenclature and improved reporting of media and research design.

Cover image: Photo by George Milton