Leigh Norma Wood

Macquarie University · Centre for Workforce Futures

Little research addresses graduate transition issues faced by transnational education (TNE) stakeholders. This paper’s conceptual framework situates alumni as central stakeholders and potential partners in developing crucial insights into TNE graduate transitions. We interviewed alumni of an Australian university campus in Vietnam (AUV) about their...

Case studies are an important way for learners to develop professional skills. In this book, we present ten case studies in the area of business sustainability that address the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Each case study is accompanied by teaching notes and assessment questions as well as marking guides.

Tasmania is a small island state of Australia with approximately half a million people. The Tasmanian government would like to encourage tourism to improve employment opportunities for its people, and one popular national park in Tasmania’s eastern region has been earmarked as a destination with the potential. However, to increase visitor numbers,...

In our digital 21st century, work demands a different set of skills than that of our industrial past. Educational institutions need to do more to help students both complete tertiary education and be ready for a future that will require continual learning. This chapter presents a case for improving non-cognitive skills, and particularly discipline,...

This book is aimed at business schools around the globe. We offer rich case studies, teaching notes and assessment ideas to help business educators embed sustainability in curriculum. These international case studies are situated in Mauritius, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia and India however they have global applicability. Each chapter is a joint c...

Purpose The role of discipline in achieving higher academic and workplace performance is receiving increasing attention; however, research into student discipline has historically centred on schools. The purpose of this paper is to explore how university students from multiple faculties and at different stages of academic progression understand dis...

Purpose Research into employability initiatives such as work integrated learning (WIL) in transnational education (TNE) is scarce, and the alumni voice in TNE is largely unreported. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to TNE research by investigating the value of internship electives in the TNE campus location. Design/methodology/approach...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to focus on transition of engineering graduates to work. It asks: “What approaches and enabling activities can organisational induction programs use to support successful transition to practice for new-career engineers?” Design/methodology/approach The paper is grounded in literature review; it discusses cent...

This paper reviews literature that explores the role of judgement in professional practice. It discusses how workplace decisions, work activities and reflection on these activities may contribute to the development of wise judgements, or ‘wisdom’, and how workplaces can leverage these activities for induction and transition to work programmes. This...

Higher education plays a critically important role in society. It contributes to physical and mental well-being for individuals. Higher education has a powerful role to play in improving economic prosperity; it promotes better use of resources and supports sustainable development. However, around the globe, higher education faces many challenges an...

Australia’s large and diverse student cohort challenges our universities to provide innovative and integrated ways of supporting students at an appropriate scale. In response, we developed an initiative called KickStart to help students become more engaged with their unit (i.e. subject) content and feel better prepared and motivated at a critical s...

The idea of computational thinking as skills and universal competence which every child should possess emerged last decade and has been gaining traction ever since. This raises a number of questions, including how to integrate computational thinking into the curriculum, whether teachers have computational thinking pedagogical capabilities to teach...

Poster / visualisation summarising the alignment of factor analysis of survey results to the Gordon, B. M. (1984). What is an Engineer? presentation at the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) Annual Conference.

Poster visualising survey results of a questionnaire interpreted via factor analysis. Findings indicate touchpoints and opportunities for ongoing university and organisational partnering on transition to work programs.

Poster / visualisation that summarises the the results of leveraging the Tuning Process methodology for engineering workplace L&D programs. Data and poster is a companion piece to further analysis.

This book explores successful transition strategies to, within and from university for students from around the globe, with Macquarie University, a large Australian university, studied in depth. It addresses the meaning of success taking a variety of perspectives, including student, staff and employer views. The chapters present a series of initiat...

Formal mentoring programmes continue to gain popularity in higher education, mirroring trends in industry. The study described in this article examines the design features of a formal mentoring programme for first year undergraduates and focused on three key aspects – the matching process, training and orientation, and interaction frequency. The pr...

Purpose Economics is catering to a diverse student cohort. This cohort needs to be equipped with transformative concepts that students can integrate beyond university. When a curriculum is content-driven, threshold concepts are a useful tool in guiding curriculum re-design. Approach The evidence for this pedagogic need can be seen in the UK’s high...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate and identify threshold concepts that are the essential conceptual content of finance programmes. Design/methodology/approach – Conducted in three stages with finance academics and students, the study uses threshold concepts as both a theoretical framework and a research methodology. Findings...

Mastering social science research methodology is a daunting challenge for doctoral candidates. This chapter explores these challenges by considering what comprises the essential threshold concepts of social science methodology. Particular attention is given in this discussion to the doctoral dissertation phase of learning and the critical role of s...

A better educated workforce contributes to a more informed and tolerant society with higher economic output, and this is also associated with higher levels of personal health, interpersonal trust and civic and social engagement. Against this backdrop, the role of universities has expanded, as university learning has moved beyond providing an educat...

Capstone subjects are increasingly used in Universities worldwide to complete the undergraduate program experience and to transition graduates into the workplace. As such, capstones fulfil a large role consolidating one experience and traversing the gap to another. Yet, little is known or understood about their design, their implementation or evalu...

Finance threshold concepts are the essential conceptual knowledge that underpin well-developed financial capabilities and are central to the mastery of finance. In this paper we investigate threshold concepts in finance from the point of view of students, by establishing the extent to which students are aware of threshold concepts identified by fin...

Whilst the financial services sector has been a major employer of mathematics graduates, specialist finance programs that develop finance capabilities are in increasing demand. However, research into the role of mathematics in finance programs is limited. Our study addresses this by using threshold concepts to investigate what finance academics ide...

Graduates with well-developed capabilities in finance are invaluable to our society and in increasing demand. Universities face the challenge of designing finance programmes to develop these capabilities and the essential knowledge that underpins them. Our research responds to this challenge by identifying threshold concepts that are central to the...

This paper reports on a qualitative study exploring the role and functionality of emotions in feedback. In-depth interview data from students and lecturers at an Australian university are analysed using cognitive appraisal and prototype theory. Results suggest that students experience a range of positive and negative emotions in feedback contexts w...

Transitions from 'industry' to 'academia' represent a unique type of career change. Although such transitions are becoming increasingly common in Australian universities and beyond, there is no coherent framework for making sense of the multiple and intersecting factors involved in these inter-domain movements. This form of occupational transition...

This paper presents results of an investigation exploring the experience and functionality of positive feelings and emotions in learning and teaching. The role of emotions in learning is receiving increasing attention; however, few studies have researched how university students and academics experience and perceive positive emotions. A prototype a...

A university education in actuarial studies and related areas prepares graduates for a wide range of careers. This study demonstrates that recent graduates working in the financial services industry make significant use of spreadsheet software. We found that all 76 respondents use spreadsheet software, and more than half spend at least 60% of their...

The role of universities in preparing students to use spreadsheet and other technical software in the financial services workplace has been investigated through surveys of university graduates, university academics, and employers. It is found that graduates are less skilled users of software than employers would like, due at least in part to a lack...

Discipline-specific discourse is the way disciplines and professions use language in a particular way. A key part of a student’s journey is learning the discourse of their discipline. In this guide we show how discourse and communication skills are embedded in programs and how learning outcomes, assessment tasks and learning and teaching activities...

Software, particularly spreadsheet software, is ubiquitous in the financial services workplace. Yet little is known about the extent to which universities should, and do, prepare graduates for this aspect of the modern workplace. We have investigated this issue through a survey of financial services employers of graduates, the results of which are...

This paper presents an overview of the options available to universities to employ mentoring by academics for the successful academic transition of students to university. Much has been written about the use of peer mentors to assist with the personal transition to university however students crave personal contact with their professors. We review...

This paper describes how a large Australian university implemented a new curriculum management tool-UNITS. UNITS is an online repository of unit guides and a curriculum mapping tool. We analyze the advantages of using a university-wide curriculum management tool and the change management processes used to develop the bespoke tool. Staff development...

Assessments have a significant influence on what and how students learn. While there has been debate as to the merits of examinations as an assessment tool, they will form a major component of assessment in many disciplines for the foreseeable future. To ensure examinations fulfil the dual roles of an assessment tool and motivation for student lear...

The study examined the experience of communication in the workplace for mathematics graduates with a view to enriching university curriculum. I broaden the work of Burton and Morgan (2000), who investigated the discourse practices of academic mathematicians to examine the discourse used by new mathematics graduates in industry and their perceptions...

We have been investigating university student conceptions of mathematics over a number of years, with the goal of enhancing student learning and professional development. We developed an open-ended survey of three questions, on “What is mathematics” and two questions about the role of mathematics in the students’ future. This questionnaire was comp...

We report on an international study about mathematics students’ ideas of how they will use mathematics in their future study and careers. This builds on our previous research into students’ conceptions of mathematics. In this paper, we use data from two groups of students studying mathematics: those who participated in an in-depth interview and tho...

Recognition that traditional forms of university course delivery are inappropriate in preparing students for a dynamic workforce in a post-industrialist, knowledge society (Drucker, 1995) has been well documented. Collaborative learning, where implemented has been recognised as an effective transition factor in supporting the development of higher...

Assessment drives what students learn. The types of tasks that we set show students what we value and how we expect them to direct their time. In this guide we go beyond the tasks set in a unit to take a “whole of program” approach to designing and aligning assessment.

In this chapter we draw on our research with mathematics students and recent graduates to investigate the tertiary mathematics curriculum. We present an argument for a particular vision of such a curriculum, which we refer to as a ‘broad’ as opposed to a ‘narrow’ curriculum. A narrow curriculum looks inwards and focuses primarily on the mathematics...

In this first chapter we introduce our overall aim: to understand how a person, often a student, goes through the process of becoming a mathematician, and how he or she comes to think of themselves as a mathematician. Over the course of more than a decade, with a number of colleagues in university education, we have grappled with various aspects of...

In this chapter we consider the question of how mathematics lecturers in classes that may be small, but are often quite large, can assess and track the views that their students have about mathematics and its uses. To answer the question, we describe the third stage in our overall project: the development and utilisation of a closed-form survey of...

In this chapter we continue our investigations of students who have made the transition to becoming mathematicians. We report on a study with mathematics graduates that focused on their views of the role of communication in their transition to professional work. Here, we use the notion of mathematical communication as another lens to investigate th...

In this concluding chapter we summarise the main ideas and arguments of the previous chapters, based on the research that we have carried out with many students and graduates of the mathematical sciences. Here we allow two students to present their context, goals and ideas about their mathematical studies in a more extensive way – one is an enginee...

In this chapter we investigate students’ views about learning mathematics. We continue our analysis of the interviews that we conducted with undergraduate mathematics majors at an Australian university. Here we move the focus to their ideas about how they go about studying mathematics. We present a theoretical model based on our research findings,...

In this chapter we begin our investigation of the process of becoming a mathematician. The first step in this inquiry is based on a series of interviews that we carried out with a small number of students studying mathematics as a major at an Australian university. In these interviews we asked students about their ideas of mathematics as a discipli...

In this chapter we examine the role of mathematics academics in the teaching and learning of university mathematics courses. We consider various ways in which university mathematics educators could enhance their professional work by guiding students towards not only learning mathematics, but also becoming mathematicians. This aim arises from a view...

In this chapter we continue our investigation of students’ views about mathematics. Here we move to the second phase of our project, involving a much larger and more diverse group, over a 1,000 undergraduate students from five universities in five different countries and continents. By extending our research to an international undergraduate group,...

Software may be used in university teaching both to enhance student learning of discipline-content knowledge and skills, and to equip students with capabilities that will be useful in their future careers. Although research has indicated that software may be used as an effective way of engaging students and enhancing learning in certain scenarios,...

Mathematicians are everywhere and nowhere: although they play key roles in industry and research, business and science, the people who use the ideas and tools of the mathematics are often invisible and difficult to identify. This leads to a lack of clarity for students who are studying the mathematical sciences in their transition to professional l...

The chapter on university learners of mathematics in the previous four-yearly review concluded that mathematics learning and teaching was in a "state of flux" (Wood, 2008, p. 91). The research reviewed in that chapter reported contradictory findings: perhaps because there was little attempt to delve beneath the surface features of lectures to inqui...

As competition intensifies, higher education providers are facing ever more complex challenges in attracting and retaining students. These new marketing challenges have necessitated a need to more comprehensively understand the factors that lead to positive perceptions of the institutions services, as well as positive referral of the brand. This re...

Professional development is a key factor in ensuring teaching staff are confident in the delivery of quality teaching. Professional development is especially relevant for staff who are new to teaching and are required to teach in the context of the large and increasingly diverse student cohorts, prevalent in the Faculty of Business and Economics. T...

Due to the changing nature of learning and teaching in universities, there is a growing need for professional development for lecturers and tutors teaching in disciplines in the mathematical sciences. Mathematics teaching staff receive some training in learning and teaching but many of the courses running at university level are not tailored to the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review research and strategies in Australian business education that aim to foster graduate capabilities in sustainability concepts and practices, also to present a case study of teaching practice along with ideas for future development. Design/methodology/approach – The authors report on a research projec...

This paper reports on a case study which examined factors leading to the adoption of graphics calculators (GCs) by secondary mathematics teachers in the state of New South Wales, Australia. In total, 587 teachers of the General Mathematics Course (Years 11 and 12) participated in the study. The median teachers' stage of adoption of GCs was found to...

This chapter presents strategies to implement graduate skills in business undergraduate programmes. We have developed teaching and learning resources to cultivate and grade student learning in the four areas of teamwork, critical thinking, ethical practice and sustainability. We discuss our experience of implementing resources at a programme level,...

This article presents the background to a general increase in interest in developing the graduate skills of undergraduates in business in Australian universities. The change reflects the call from industry for greater emphasis on these skills; changes in the existing skills of students commencing a business education; and in the perceived role of u...

Assessment drives what students learn and standards drive industry. In this paper we link the two and describe how we developed robust, practical standards for graduate skills that can be used to design learning tasks and rubrics to assess learning tasks. They act also as a clear statement to students about expectations for their learning as well a...

Stakeholder analysis is an essential part of business education as students develop awareness of the different perspectives that influence business and the difficult decisions made by business, government and communities. An important aspect of learning is to think critically about who is presenting the viewpoint and the conclusions they have drawn...

Transitioning to university can be difficult and encompasses many changes. This paper is concerned with identifying how initial student experiences on campus can be enhanced in order to influence students’ perception of university. Universities are now under pressure to develop in graduates a wide range of skills, and we highlight the fact that equ...

This paper reports on a study aimed at exploring student perceptions of teaching and learning in the disciplines of business, accounting and economics. Twenty-three students from two Sydney-based faculties were interviewed and their responses analysed qualitatively. Their educational expectations are articulated in five major pedagogical themes inc...

Why a book on gender issues in mathematics in the 21st century? Several factors have influenced theundertaking of this project by the editors. First, an international volume focusing on gender and mathematicshas not appeared since publication of papers emerging from the 1996 International Congress onMathematical Education (Keitel, 1998). Surely it...

The transition from university to professional working life is important to individual students, employers, universities and more generally to national economies. A better understanding of the match between skills required by industry and skills learnt at university is therefore paramount. This study examines the transition from the perspectives of...

This chapter explores the use of assessment feedback as a pedagogical practice to achieve high standards of quality education for all students. The following discussion is based on results of an empirical study on student preferences for feedback conducted in a business faculty with a high proportion of international students, and students from cul...

This article investigates enrolment trends in mathematical sciences in Australian universities. Data has been difficult to extract and the coding for mathematical disciplines has made investigation challenging. We show that the number of mathematics major undergraduates in Australia is steadily declining though the number studying mathematics-based...

This paper describes an innovative contribution to learning, using Mathematica in an interactive package 1 . Unlike previous approaches which h a v e used Mathematica , there is no need for the student to learn Mathematica, a process which may often obscure the mathematics. Our approach renders the Mathematica completely transparent b y w a y of pr...

What do our students think of mathematics and how do we help prepare them for the workplace? This article reports results from an open-ended questionnaire with engineering students in five countries. We investigate how they conceive of mathematics and how they per-ceive their university study has prepared them for the workforce. The results show th...

There is not just one mathematics taught at university level, nor is there one group of students. Mathematics is taught differently depending on the discipline and the perceived background of the student. There is engineering mathematics for the students heading towards engineering degrees, life science mathematics for those heading towards biology...

When university academics implement changes in learning, such as introducing blended learning, it is conventional practice to examine and evaluate the impact of the resulting curriculum reform. Judging the worth and impact of an educational development is a complex task involving subtle differences in learning. Qualitative methods to explore these...

Mathematics is a method for communicating ideas between people about concepts such as numbers, space and time. In any culture there is a common, structured system for such communication, whether it be in unwritten or written forms. These systems can form bridges of communication across culture and across time.

Learning and teaching is an important component of university life – critical for students and also for those who teach. Our aim is to make this practice more enjoyable and effective for all involved, and at the same time to encourage a scholarly approach to the process. This volume of Asian Social Science is devoted to the work of a team of academ...

Provision of effective and high quality feedback has been identified as a key element of quality teaching. Despite its importance this area has been neglected in research to date; in particular research on student experiences of feedback. In a previous study Rowe and Wood (2008) invited economic and finance students (both undergraduate and postgrad...

Measurement of the quality of teaching activities is becoming increasingly important since universities are rewarding performance in terms of promotion, awards and bonuses and research is no longer the only key performance indicator. Good teaching is not easy to identify and measure. This paper specifically deals with the issue of good teaching in...

Lectures remain the lynchpin of mathematics teaching at university even with advances in information technology and access to the internet. This paper examines the requirements for learning mathematics and shows how important it is for lecturers to be aware of the different modes of presentation they are using. Ways to assist students to make the c...

Recent graduates of degrees in the mathematical sciences were interviewed in depth about their work and the skills required to perform those tasks. One common undertaking could be described as teaching: demonstrating to colleagues, training their assistants or explaining mathematics to their managers. The paper describes how this understanding of t...

In this paper, we report on an international study of undergraduate mathematics students’ conceptions of mathematics. Almost 1,200 students in five countries completed a short survey including three open-ended questions asking about their views of mathematics and its role in their future studies and planned professions. Responses were analysed star...

A couple of years ago I did an in-depth study of graduates of mathematical sci- ences and asked them about their roles as mathematicians in the workplace. These graduates suggested changes to content, learning methods and structure of uni- versity programs to assist with their transition to the workplace. Kent et al. (1) studied employer needs for...

In this paper, we describe and investigate three aspects of learning mathematics: intention, approach and outcome. These aspects have emerged from interviews with students where their experience of learning mathematics, their understanding of mathematics as a discipline field, and their perception of work as a mathematician were the objects of stud...

With the rise in group work across schools and universities, there has been a great deal of research regarding the beneficial impacts of teamwork on learning. However, research is limited in the area of assessment of group work in mathematics at the tertiary level. This qualitative based study in asn investigation into problems faced by tertiary st...

Student opinions were assessed as part of a review of current practices at UTS in cross-faculty teaching. The methods included focus group sessions with students, questionnaires sent by email, and analysis of responses to UTS student feedback surveys. The cross-faculty teaching issue was applied to the teaching of physics and mathematics (as well a...

This paper concerns a study of the performance of students in a linear algebra examination. Differences in performance of tasks requiring understanding of concepts with those that required only the use of routine procedures and factual recall were investigated. Central to the study was the use of a taxonomy based on Bloom's Taxonomy for characteriz...

The last decade has seen a substantial increase in the cultural and academic diversity of commencing tertiary education cohorts. The challenge for mathematics and statistics educators is the development of curriculum measures which address the language related difficulties of language minority students (Cocking & Mestre, 1988) and improve learning...

It is clear that the pre-eminent position of mathematics has been challenged, particularly in Western countries. Its position has been taken over by computing and computer-based technology. Fewer students are studying mathematics at higher levels in secondary schools, due to competition for time in the secondary curriculum. Fewer students are study...

The important issues in assessment practices for university undergraduates are identified. The way in which assessment can be used to enhance student learning, the impact of external factors on assessment methods and the barriers that inhibit change are discussed. The paper also discusses the various ways in which changes in assessment practices ha...

The unique features of video, most particularly its ability to communicate on an a ective plane, make it an important tool in mathematics learning. This is particularly so at the secondary-tertiary interface, where students and teachers face a particular combination of problems. In this paper, we provide evidence for this thesis, based on our exper...

A process is described for creating a more civerse set of experiences for undergraduate students in mathematics. While we use examples drawn from classes studying linear algebra, the procedures are appropriate for any undergraduate course in mathematics. The diversity of the activities is generated in part through the use of a taxonomy which addres...