Project Title: A Pilot Study to Evaluate the Effectiveness of a Peer Support Model
Project Leader(s): Pauline Walsh, Julie Green, Shelagh Heneghan, Kim Sargeant and Cath Hill
The aim of this project is to evaluate the implementation of a new peer support model in order to establish its effectiveness in supporting professional reflection and development. It will ascertain both strengths and weaknesses of implementing such an approach within a health related school alongside its transferability to non health related areas. The outcomes of the evaluation project will provide recommendations for the future implementation of the peer support model. Through this evaluation, methods for dissemination of best practice and their impact on the student learning experience can be identified and integrated into the school learning and teaching plan.
A Pilot Study to Evaluate the Effectiveness of a Peer Support Model by Pauline Walsh, Julie Green, Shelagh Heneghan, Kim Sargeant and Cath Hill, Keele University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Project Title: Exploring the Attitude of Geography Students to Information Resources and Journal Literature
Project Leader(s): Richard Waller, Peter Adey and Peter Knight
This project aims both to examine the attitudes of Geography students to the use of a variety of information resources and to identify ways in which they can be encouraged to engage with advanced sources of information (especially journal articles) at various stages throughout their degree programme. It will build upon the findings of a current Action Research project that has explored this issue within the context of a single year 2 module. By examining students’ attitudes to journal literature throughout their time at Keele, this project will generate new understandings of the evolvingreasons behind their choices of research material from the time they arrive at Keele until the time they graduate. The project will also evaluate the effectiveness of a range of interventions, some of which stem from the findings of the current project, and others that will be developed through active discussion with the student participants.Its desired impact is to encourage and enable students to engage with more advanced sources of information as they progress through their degree programmes, through the use of targeted interventions that seek to overcome the barriers they identify at various stages in their careers. We genuinely believe that if students can be encouraged to engage with such sources, it will help them identify what is going on at the “cutting edge” of the discipline, introduce them to the idea of academic progress through active debate, and ultimately help them achieve better results in their assignments.
We believe this proposals is both original and innovative as first and foremost, surprisingly little work has been undertaken on this topic to date, particularly in U.K. Higher Education. An examination of student attitudes to what are considered traditional academic learning resources is particularly urgent as today’s students display a markedly different skill set from those of a five or ten years ago (see section 2). Consequently, encouraging today’s students to engage with information resources to which they are either unfamiliar or resistant, poses a new challenge whose resolution will require the generation of bespoke and innovative interventions.
Exploring the Attitude of Geography Students to Information Resources and Journal Literature by Richard Waller, Peter Adey and Peter Knight, Keele University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
