In response to challenges emerging in society, universities are searching for ways to innovate their courses through novel institutional educational policies and practices. Those efforts, however, are often not informed by knowledge about course innovation characteristics university-wide, and are often not supported by processes of reflection…

Critical-thinking skills are a desired higher education outcome and a primary goal in education. This research focuses on fostering college students' critical thinking through reflective writing. During an 18-week study, a total of 60 English majors were recruited. Both quantitative and qualitative data was collected, including 1) the pre- and…

Students develop diversity-relevant graduate attributes over time. First steps to cross-cultural competency include learning to recognise and respectfully engage with competing interpretations of history and disparate positionalities, including Indigenous diversity. To learn such skills, students need multiple non-threatening opportunities to…

The University of Sydney has introduced a program of engaging engineering students throughout their degree program in diverse forms of exposure to, and engagement with, professional practice. As part of this program students are required to write detailed reflections on each activity. These reflections provide a rich source of information…

This article presents an ethnographic case study of pre-service teachers' transformative learning in a Culture-Writing course at a Chinese university. In recounting three stories with fieldwork data gleaned from moments of students' pre-class discussions, reflective writings, and reports on term-paper projects, this study showcases how a group of…

Against the backdrop of prevalent student attrition in engineering education, this study draws upon Margaret Archer's social realistic theory and offers a close-up analysis of how structural and cultural factors interplay to affect Chinese university engineering faculty members' perceptions of and agency in practicing 'scholarly teaching'.…

Meaningful reflection on their learning and skill development is often lacking in the experience of undergraduates. Many students do not recognise the curriculum-embedded development of transferable skills and lack the ability to articulate such skills. This mixed-methods study sought to investigate whether engaging students in reflection would…

While reflection has long been held to be central to learning, not all reflection leads to insight or learning. Drawing on distinctions in psychology between 'constructive self-regulation' and 'rumination' and educational literature that distinguishes descriptive from reflective writing, this article employs a novel approach to assign student…

Recent focus on graduate employability has exposed the inadequacies of work preparation for science students, who need an employability toolkit to navigate the modern work landscape. An established mechanism to develop students' employment awareness is Work Integrated Learning (WIL), but Australian mathematics and science students participate in…

While previous studies have explored many aspects of teacher educators' identities, limited attention has been paid to how teacher educators understand the process of their academic identity construction in higher education. To address this issue, we draw on interviews and other supplementary data collected from 19 teacher education academics in…

With society increasingly valuing soft skills and competencies, reflective practices are more commonly adopted in higher education, particularly for experiential learning. As reflective writing is becoming a part of official assessments in many courses, an overarching question arises as to how teachers are currently assessing reflections. This…

During the last 20 years, we have witnessed a growing interest in research in teaching, learning and educational development in higher education (HE). The result is that "Higher Education Didactics" has established itself as a research field in its own right. This article explores Higher Education Didactics as a framework for academics'…

Reflective practice can support student learning by enabling praxis: the bridging of the theory of the classroom with the students' learning experience. Students' written reflections are the most common mode for practising and documenting reflection. Available typologies for coding the level of student written reflections focus on the cognitive…

Graduate employability is a key issue for higher education as new graduates face a highly competitive and rapidly changing employment sector. To maximise their likelihood of employment, graduates need to be able to demonstrate the skills and attributes most valued by employers. Employers, however, have long criticised the ability of graduates to…

Scholars writing on agency argue that normally, individuals who experience social structures as comfortable will tend to want to reproduce them while those who experience these structures as oppressive will want to change them. This is a bleak outlook because it suggests that those in positions of power and influence are less likely to seek to…