Agnes E Dodds

• University of Melbourne

Refugee crises present intractable policy problems at international, national and local levels. Refugee policy issues are misunderstood, misrepresented or inadequately processed and unresolved in the tensions of ambivalence to refugees and asylum-seekers. In this chapter, we examine whether refugee migration problems can be characterised as wicked...

In this paper, we examine relational interactions between refugee children and social institutions, building the case for the recognition of the co-occurrence and intertwining of vulnerability and agency in children’s experiences in diverse refugee situations. This developmental relational approach offers refinement of a general relational worldvie...

Refugee children's experiences are situated in specific places where they interact with significant people. They are not usually asked about their perspectives although they are social agents with distinctive perspectives and feelings about relationships and events. We investigated the perspectives of refugee children on their experiences of places...

In this paper we analyze the contemporary ambivalence to child migration identified by Jacqueline Bhabha and propose a developmental relational approach that repositions child refugees as active participants and rights-bearers in society. Ambivalence involves tensions between protection of refugee children and protection of national borders, public...

Background/Aims Diabetes mellitus is increasingly prevalent among hospital inpatients. Management requires regular blood glucose monitoring by nurses, yet research into nurse perceptions of glucose management importance is lacking. Methods A 5-point Likert-scale survey was administered to 718 nurses at an Australian tertiary centre. Nurses were pr...

In the midst of clinical environment unpredictability, feedback helps students to make the most out of clinical learning opportunities. Mini clinical evaluation exercise (Mini-CEX) is considered to be appropriate for providing feedback to students. This study aims to explore the feedback process within the Mini-CEX at a large Australian medical sch...

Refugee children are identified as rights-bearers by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), but their rights are not uniformly honored in the policies and practices of contemporary states. How the CRC’s safeguards for refugee children’s rights are honored depends partly on what it means to be ‘a refugee child’ and partly on...

Understanding the perspectives of refugee children on their lives is important for acknowledging children's rights, competence, and contributions to practice and policy. Children's perspectives are the views they construct for framing events, relationships and images, and the meanings they convey in relational coactions with other people and instit...

Background Reflection on learning is an essential component of effective learning. Deconstructing the components of reflection on learning using a self-regulated learning (SRL) framework, allows the assessment of students’ ability to reflect on their learning. The aim of this study was to validate an instrument to measure medical students’ reflecti...

Background: Despite the growing use, studies have demonstrated some limitations related to the feedback provided in the context of the increasing use of the Mini Clinical Evaluation Exercise (Mini-CEX) in undergraduate medical education. This study examined the written feedback provided on the Mini-CEX form to determine its usefulness as a learning...

Resistance is all around us in contemporary life. It is an everyday phenomenon of personal and cultural life, as the Chaudhary et al. (2017) volume establishes with theoretical analyses and empirical examples from diverse cultural contexts. Resistance functions in the dynamics of person-by-culture encounters when one party takes an opposing positio...

Digital media are beneficial for research of complex refugee issues, as they allow refugees to express their personal experiences of complex issues in ways that are not restricted by language barriers or limited in authenticity, while also offering researchers a way to systematically compare refugees’ varied experiences. We used a computerised conc...

Children from refugee backgrounds have the right and the ability to contribute to research knowledge. But they need researchers to develop methods that enact respect and are theoretically appropriate. This chapter describes a methodological approach to understanding the well-being of children from refugee backgrounds from their own perspective. Two...

Background To ensure the rigour of objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) in assessing medical students, medical school educators must educate examiners with a view to standardising examiner assessment behaviour. Delivering OSCE examiner training is a necessary yet challenging part of the OSCE process. A novel approach to implementing t...

Surgeons require advanced psychomotor skills, critical decision-making and teamwork skills. Much of surgical skills training involve progressive trainee participation in supervised operations where case variability, operating team interaction and environment affect learning, while surgical teachers face the key challenge of ensuring patient safety....

Absence-like seizures in the Genetic Absence Epilepsy Rats from Strasbourg (GAERS) model are believed to arise in hyperexcitable somatosensory cortical neurons, however the cellular basis of this increased excitability remains unknown. We have previously shown that expression of the Transmembrane AMPA receptor Regulatory Protein (TARP), stargazin,...

Children have the right to express themselves and to be involved in the construction of knowledge. In this article, we argue for the right of refugee children to express their thoughts and feelings in research, and for the obligation of researchers to enable their self-expression. We propose respect as the driving force for enabling children's righ...

Aims: To compare participation in peer physical examination (PPE) for male and female students when learning abdomen and chest examinations; to compare attitudes towards PPE for male and female students; and to determine if self-reported participation as examinees in PPE was related to attitudes towards PPE. Background: The opportunity to learn phy...

Background: Opportunities for medical students to engage in deliberate practice through conducting patient assessments may be declining, but data on the numbers of patients assessed by students during training are lacking. Purposes: The study described relationships between the frequency of patient assessments, student confidence, belief they ha...

Many health professionals report interest in consulting more effectively with young people but have unmet training needs. We set out to evaluate a teaching resource in adolescent health and medicine that was designed for Australian trainees in specialist medicine. Thirty-two paediatric and adult trainees of the Royal Australasian College of Physici...

Recent evidence suggests that graduate-entry medical students may have a marginal academic performance advantage over undergraduate entrants in a pre-clinical curriculum in both bioscience knowledge and clinical skills assessments. It is unclear whether this advantage is maintained in the clinical phase of medical training. The study aimed to compa...

There is little research on student attitudes toward participating in peer physical examination (PPE). This study explored first-year medical students' attitudes toward PPE and their willingness to participate in PPE before they had experience with PPE as part of their course. First-year medical students (n = 119) rated their willingness to partici...

Objectives: This cross sectional study aimed to investigate the relative effectiveness of a problem based learning curriculum (PBL) and a traditional curriculum (TC) in the development of medical students' diagnostic reasoning skills. Methods: Junior and senior clinical students (n = 431) at a single clinical school of the University of Melbourne s...

Objectives: This cross sectional study aimed to investigate the relative effectiveness of a problem based learning curriculum (PBL) and a traditional curriculum (TC) in the development of medical students' diagnostic reasoning skills. Methods: Junior and senior clinical students (n = 431) at a single clinical school of the University of Melbourne s...

In this paper, we take forward Schwarz's (2009) disjunction between measurement-apparatus-questionnaire and measurement-apparatus-man to examine how the crisis in contemporary psychology is related to assumptions about two sets of connections in research: connections between research tools, research behaviours, and psychological phenomena; and conn...

We examined self-descriptions of children of Somali refugee families in Australian primary schools, focusing on how children’s school-related skills and needs relate to the interpretive frames of mainstream and ethnic cultures. Three groups of Grade 5 and 6 children (Somali, Disadvantaged, Advantaged) made choices among school-related skills, and r...

This study compared the academic performance of graduate- and undergraduate-entry medical students completing the same pre-clinical curriculum and assessment at a large metropolitan university. Arguments have been made for the relative merits of both graduate- and undergraduate-entry medical programmes. However, data on the academic performance of...

Nurses ‘representations of their work are defined as their cognitive ‘work spaces’, a theoretical concept derived from Newell & Simon's (1977) problem-solving model and Lewin's (1935) concept of interacting positive and negative valences Using a structural equation modelling technique, a network of positive and negative features in nurses ‘work spa...

Background The purpose of the undergraduate surgical education program is to prepare students for their internship and eventual vocational practice. It is also an opportunity to sow the seeds of a possible career in surgery. Methods In order to understand students’ perspective of their surgical program and the various factors which might impact on...

We used a developmental framework to structure and analyze 24 women's personal accounts of the impact of type1 diabetes on their lives. The developmental framework draws on RIEGEL's (1979) dialectical model of how disruption leads to developmental change as the person works to regain a lost equilibrium. Our questions focused on participants' qualit...

We address the issue of how cultural psychologies relate to human everyday life-worlds. Everyday life entails the extraordinary within the ordinary, and vice versa— often described as cultural practices. We present the case of an involuntary event—breaking a leg—with all its temporarily debilitating experiences. The person became involved in a seri...

The world-wide move away from the didactic teaching of single disciples to integrated Problem-based Learning (PBL) curricula in medical education has posed challenges for the basic sciences. In this paper we identify two major challenges. The first challenge is the need to describe a core disciplinary curriculum that can be articulated and mapped o...

To develop and evaluate a short education programme to improve the skills and confidence of junior doctors in managing the glycaemic control of inpatients with diabetes mellitus. A total of 15 junior doctors completed two 1-hour workshops on the practical skills required to manage the glycaemic control of insulin-treated patients. The workshops wer...

This paper presents' an overview of the development of the Personal Learning Planner (PLP). The PLP is a software based support tool developed to assist students' with their self directed learning. The educational context indicating the need for such a tool is described and the conceptual underpinnings of the three sections of the PLP are presented...

Problem-based learning (PBL) in medicine emphasises the tutor's role in facilitating collaborative and integrated learning. While it is widely recognised that tutors come to know their students, they traditionally play little part in the formal assessment process. We introduced tutor assessment into a problem-based medical curriculum and examined t...

Contemporary sociocultural theories of the development of the self in society need to explain how the social becomes personal and how development can occur in each domain. George Herbert Mead' s concept of the `Generalized Other' gives an account of the social origin of self-consciousness while retaining the transforming function of the personal. C...

This important volume deals with the issue of how to make comparisons in the field of human development. In their comparisons of various social groups, social scientists generally focus on what the differences are, rather than elucidating how and why the groups differ. Comparisons in Human Development examines ways in which different disciplines ha...

Nurses' representations of their work are defined as their cognitive 'work spaces', a theoretical concept derived from Newell & Simon's (1977) problem-solving model and Lewin's (1935) concept of interacting positive and negative valences. Using a structural equation modelling technique, a network of positive and negative features in nurses' work sp...

A multidisciplinary team has designed a new study program for a Biology unit on the Australian Fauna and Flora. Interactive computer programs, videos, printed materials and tutorials provide students with varied learning activities, with assessment exercises feeding back to students on their progress through the material. Self-study materials in th...

Australian university students' views of the nuclear arms race were analysed in two studies. A sample comparison study used Nuclear Arms Race Questionnaire (NARQ) and Position on Nuclear Weapons (PNW) scales to compare university students' views with those of high school students and community groups. University students' views were more strongly a...

This paper reports a shady of nurses' perceptions of the positive and negative features of the work environment and their contribution to satisfaction with nursing The concept of a ‘work space’ was developed to describe nurses' mental images of the features of their work environment Eighty-four final-year student nurses and 75 registered nurses rat...

Fifty-three external university students and a comparison group of 51 on-campus social and political theory students responded to a written questionnaire on their perceptions of the factors influencing their external studies. Responses were obtained to objective questions and by written open-ended advice to two hypothetical prospective external stu...

A model was developed at Murdoch University, Western Australia, to describe distance students’ perceptions of their aims and plans for studying a course. The model follows Polya's Heuristic and Newell & Simon's General Problem Solver of students’ plans and sub-goals for achieving those plans. Verbal reports of four students were described using the...