Simone Volet

Researchers have described the advantages of complex, realistic, and challenging science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) learning environments that engage students in the practices of STEM disciplines. Benefits include increasing students’ likelihood to transfer skills learned during school activities to practice, value of the task, and motivation.1,2,3 Research teams from four universities are currently studying productive disciplinary engagement in these types of learning environments. Productive disciplinary engagement occurs when learners use the discourses and practices of the discipline in authentic tasks in order to “get somewhere” (develop a product, improve a process, gain better understanding of a phenomenon) over time. Productive engagement in meaningful, authentic activity is essential for motivation and progress toward flexible, adaptive expertise in STEM, but learning systems that support it are complex and difficult to scale. Such systems are usually studied and designed in single contexts (e.g., high school environmental science classrooms, engineering design projects), so the knowledge gained, though rich, is difficult to transfer to new settings. Through collaboration among researchers from the United States (Washington and Oregon), Finland, and Australia who study these systems in different curricular, institutional and cultural contexts, we aim to identify unifying themes and develop generalizable understandings about supporting engagement and learning in STEM. We focus on group settings in authentic contexts, where students must integrate and flexibly apply concepts and practices.

A comparative case study examined two teams for instances of Productive Disciplinary Engagement (PDE) as they completed a complex, virtual process development project. Discourse from team meetings was analyzed to interpret how engagement unfolds, specifically classifying engagement in two dimensions: School vs. Engineering World, and task co-production vs. knowledge co-construction. Teams were found to move back and forth between School World and Engineering World as different aspects of the learning system become salient and instances of PDE were triggered when teams experienced productive frictions from interlocking components of the learning system.

This research explores mono-cultural, mono-lingual local student perceptions of intercultural interactions in structured university learning environments through the lens of Bourdieu’s social field theory. Employing qualitative analysis, this study revealed intercultural interactions to be co-shaped by structural, institutional and contextual elements, as well as the personal dispositions students bring to the classroom. Implications for University providers are discussed.

Around 70% of Australian students have reported working more than 12 hours a week. Recent large scale research in the UK suggests that there is a negative relationship between hours worked and academic achievement. There is, however, no research to the authors’ knowledge as to how the number of working hours affect student learning in groups, and whether students in groups with varying work patterns report different learning outcomes compared to groups with similar work patterns. This study reports that, overall, greater working hours decreases students’ perceptions of the value as well as their experience of group work, and that this occurs more with 2nd and 3rd year than 1st year students. It also reveals that, students studying in groups with a large proportion of members working more than 2 days a week displayed significantly more negative appraisals of their experience at the end of a project than their peers in groups where few students were working.

The workplace is increasingly recognised as a legitimate environment for learning new skills and knowledge that enables workers to participate more effectively in ever-changing work environments. Within the workplace there is the potential for continuous learning to occur not only through formal learning initiatives that are associated with training, but also through informal learning opportunities that are embedded within everyday work activities. This paper reports the findings of an empirical study that examined workers’ personal experiences of informal learning, and how, when successful, these contributed to better participation in their regular workplace activities.

Undergraduate students majoring in Marketing are required to engage in group projects throughout their study. The main educational rationale behind requiring students to work on group projects as an integral part of their study in marketing is that the experience of group projects is a good preparation for working in teams and managing work teams in the future. Little research has been conducted which examines how students from language groups other than English perform in groups and whether more culturally diverse groups perform better than more homogenous ones. Results from across three marketing units, from 1st to third year (n=233) showed that students in mixed language groups had a much higher view of group work than those in homogenous groups and that non-English speaking students were more positive and learnt more about team work when working in mixed groups rather than homogenous groups.

Undergraduate students majoring in Marketing are required to engage in group projects throughout their study. The main educational rationale behind requiring students to work on group projects as an integral part of their study in marketing is that the experience of group projects is a good preparation for working in teams and managing work teams in the future. Little research has been conducted which examines the individual differences of learning outcomes with group projects. Results from a principles of marketing class (n=61) suggest that older students (>21 years) reported learning more about subject matter covered in group assignments, than younger students (<21 years). Students from non-Australian ESB and multilingual backgrounds reported gaining greater knowledge of working in teams than students from non-Australian ESB who were monolingual. Results also showed a number of interactions between age, gender and hours of work govern the degree of satisfaction students have with group learning.

This paper examines the overall educational, social and cultural aims of internationalisation and internationalised curricula. Two specific goals expected to enrich graduates' generic attributes are identified: Intercultural competence and skills for critical reflection on the situated and non-neutral nature of knowledge. The challenges of fostering intercultural competence embedded within the curriculum are discussed first with reference to research on group work in culturally diverse groups. The issues of cultural-emotional connectedness and language proficiency are identified as major inhibiting factors for the success of such activities. Ehancing students' skills for critical reflection on the sitated and non-neutral nature of knowledge is disussed next. A set of learning objetivbes and principles for designing internationalised curricula that promote such skills is outlined. The significance of utilising internationalisation to enhance the quality of higher education is stressed.