Phil Mark Newton

• Professor at Swansea University

Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are a common form of assessment in medical science education. The traditional MCQ format involves students picking a single best answer (SBA) from four or five options. There are concerns about the ability of SBA formats to reward partial knowledge and their susceptibility to guessing. An alternative to SBA is elimi...

The Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent national lockdowns resulted in drastic changes to the way that higher education was delivered. A mixed-methods research study was conducted to explore university students’ perceptions of online learning during the 2020/21 academic year. Students from across all Welsh higher education institutions were invited to...

Learning Styles theory promises improved academic performance based on the identification of a personal, sensory preference for informational processing. This promise is not supported by evidence, and is in contrast to our current understanding of the neuroscience of learning. Despite this lack of evidence, prior research shows that that belief in...

Arguments for and against the idea of evidence-based education have occupied the academic literature for decades. Those arguing in favor plead for greater rigor and clarity to determine “what works.” Those arguing against protest that education is a complex, social endeavor and that for epistemological, theoretical and political reasons it is not p...

A commonly cited use of Learning Styles theory is to use information from self-report questionnaires to assign learners into one or more of a handful of supposed styles (e.g., Visual, Auditory, Converger) and then design teaching materials that match the supposed styles of individual students. A number of reviews, going back to 2004, have concluded...

It is with great sadness that we share the news of the death of Dr. Tracey Bretag, who passed away on October 7, 2020 at the age of 58. Dr. Tracey Bretag co-founded the International Journal for Educational Integrity in 2006, with Helen Marsden (now Helen Titchener), sharing co-editorship with her for several issues before assuming the role of Edit...

Working memory is critical for learning but has a limited capacity for processing new information in real time. Cognitive load theory is an evidence-based approach to education that seeks to minimize the extraneous (unnecessary) load on working memory to avoid overloading it. The “seductive details effect” postulates that extraneous load can come f...

Bloom's Taxonomy is an approach to organizing learning that was first published in 1956. It is ubiquitous in UK Higher Education (HE), where Universities use it as the basis for teaching and assessment; Learning Outcomes are created using suggested verbs for each tier of the taxonomy, and these are then “constructively aligned” to assessments. We c...

Introduction Stakeholder participation in healthcare curriculum design is an important aspect of higher education with stakeholders including students, staff members, clinical partners, healthcare organisations, patients and members of the public. Significantly, student co-creation, of the curriculum, has become increasingly important. Yet there is...

Contract cheating occurs when a student outsources their assessment to a third party, regardless of the third party’s relationship with the student, or whether money is exchanged. In higher education, there is a widespread belief that assessment design is a solution to the problem of contract cheating and that authentic assessment tasks are particu...

Contract cheating is, potentially, a serious threat to the quality of higher education around the world. Prior research has focused on student perspectives and the companies themselves, but the staff view is poorly understood, despite staff being a major stakeholder with considerable influence over strategies designed to address contract cheating....

This article reports on one aspect of a nationally funded research project on contract cheating in Australian higher education. The project explored students' and educators’ experiences of contract cheating, and the contextual factors that may influence it. This article reports the key findings from non-university higher education providers (NUHEPs...

The basic idea behind the use of ‘Learning Styles' classifications is to diagnose learners into one or more of a handful of ‘styles' (e.g. Visual, Auditory, Converger) and then teach students according to their supposed style. This idea has been repeatedly tested and does not improve learning, according to current experimental evidence. Continued u...

This paper reports on findings from a large Australian research project that explored the relationship between contract cheating and assessment design. Using survey responses from 14,086 students and 1147 educators at eight universities, a multivariate analysis examined the influence of a range of factors on the likelihood that different assessment...

Objectives: Crowdsourcing works through an institution outsourcing a function normally performed by an employee or group of individuals. Within a crowdsource users, known as the crowd, form a community who voluntarily undertake a task which involves the pooling of knowledge resources. A literature review was undertaken to identify how the tool is...

Contract cheating, where students recruit a third party to undertake their assignments, is frequently reported to be increasing, presenting a threat to academic standards and quality. Many incidents involve payment of the third party, often a so-called “Essay Mill,” giving contract cheating a commercial aspect. This study synthesized findings from...

If media reports are to be believed, Australian universities are facing a significant and growing problem of students outsourcing their assessment to third parties, a behaviour commonly known as ‘contract cheating’. Teaching staff are integral to preventing and managing this emerging form of cheating, yet there has been little evidence-based resear...

Recent Australian media scandals suggest that university students are increasingly outsourcing their assessments to third parties – a behaviour known as ‘contract cheating’. This paper reports on findings from a large survey of students from eight Australian universities (n = 14,086) which sought to explore students’ experiences with and attitudes...

x

The phenomenon of contract cheating presents, potentially, a serious threat to the quality and standards of Higher Education around the world. There have been suggestions, cited below, to tackle the problem using legal means, but we find that current laws are not fit for this purpose. In this article we present a proposal for a specific new law to...

A substantial proportion of university students report committing plagiarism and related forms of misconduct. An academic integrity-focused approach to addressing plagiarism emphasises the promotion of positive values alongside education of staff and students about good, and bad, practice in writing, studying and assessment design. The concept was...

The basic idea behind the use of ‘Learning Styles’ is that learners can be categorized into one or more ‘styles’ (e.g., Visual, Auditory, Converger) and that teaching students according to their style will result in improved learning. This idea has been repeatedly tested and there is currently no evidence to support it. Despite this, belief in the...

Many strategies have been proposed to address the use of Essay Mills and other ‘contract cheating’ services by students. These services generally offer bespoke custom-written essays or other assignments to students in exchange for a fee. There have been calls for the use of legal approaches to tackle the problem. Here we determine whether the UK Fr...

Purpose: Esoteric jargon and technical language are potential barriers to the teaching of science and medicine. Effective teaching strategies which address these barriers are desirable. Here, we created and evaluated the effectiveness of standalone learning 'Equivalence-Based Instruction' (EBI) resources wherein the teaching of a small number of d...

Almost any sort of higher education assignment can now be purchased from a third party, from traditional essays all the way through to paying someone else to sit an exam. The use of custom essay-writing companies, freelancers, exam stand-ins, and other paid third parties represents a potentially significant problem for the provision of education ar...

The existence of ‘Learning Styles’ is a common ‘neuromyth’, and their use in all forms of education has been thoroughly and repeatedly discredited in the research literature. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that their use remains widespread. This perspective article is an attempt to understand if and why the myth of Learning Styles persists. I...

Almost any sort of higher education assignment can now be purchased from a third party, from traditional essays all the way through to paying someone else to sit an exam. The use of custom essay-writing companies, freelancers, exam stand-ins, and other paid third parties represents a potentially significant problem for the provision of education ar...

Freezing-like topographies of behavior are elicited in conditioned suppression tasks whereby appetitive behavior is reduced by presentations of an aversively conditioned threat cue relative to a safety cue. Conditioned suppression of operant behavior by a Pavlovian threat cue is an established laboratory model of quantifying the response impairment...

The media have a key role in communicating advances in medicine to the general public, yet the accuracy of medical journalism is an under-researched area. This project adapted an established monitoring instrument to analyse all identified news reports (n = 312) on a single medical research paper: a meta-analysis published in the British Journal of...

The medical school at Swansea University provides compulsory early exposure to clinical education through short learning opportunities in the clinical setting (LOCS). These are 3-4-h sessions chosen by students from a list of over 900. Students are required to complete ten LOCS in each of their first 2 years of medical school, with at least one per...

Establishing a positive, proactive approach to issues such as plagiarism requires that students are equipped with the skills and experience to act with integrity, and that educators are fully aware of the attitudes and ability of students, particularly when they start university. This project used a questionnaire-based methodology to probe the atti...

Students in higher education are increasingly asked to give feedback on their education experience, reflecting an increase in the importance attached to that feedback. Existing literature demonstrates that qualitative student feedback is valued and important, yet there has been limited evaluation of the means by which qualitative student feedback i...

Contract cheating is the process whereby students auction off the opportunity for others to complete assignments for them. It is an apparently widespread yet under-researched problem. One suggested strategy to prevent contract cheating is to shorten the turnaround time between the release of assignment details and the submission date, thus making i...

Social networking sites are highly popular among the medical community. Some of doctors’, trainees’ and medical students’ online activities have been criticised as compromising the reputation of the profession and the trust of the general public (Chretien, Greysen, Acad.Medicine 2009;302(12):1309–15). Research into the content of such online posts...

Acquired equivalence was investigated using a virtual reality conditioned suppression task administered in a first-person-shooter game. Two visual cues, A1 and B1, were followed by a tone (O1), and another two cues, A2 and B2, were followed by another tone (O2). During differential Pavlovian conditioning, A1 was paired with an instructed unconditio...

This review describes international trends and approaches to the planning and delivery of undergraduate and postgraduate medical education, including the assessment of trainees’ performance. It draws upon examples from countries whose cultural and geographical background may be of relevance and interest to the future development and strengthening o...

This paper reviews international approaches to commissioning and how to determine and control the number of places available on educational programs for doctors, nurses and midwives. These approaches are currently undergoing significant change in many international settings. This active state of flux provides learning opportunities for the Pacific...

This review of accreditation for healthcare professionals training and education describes international trends and approaches to the accreditation of education programs or pathways that prepare graduates for entry to a professional register or to extend scopes of practice.

The process of registration and licensing is designed to protect the public from harm perpetrated by incompetent health care workers, particularly those in the private sector over whom there is little or no administrative oversight. This review describes international trends and approaches to regulatory and licensing systems and the integration of...

This review of complementary roles to those of traditional health workers, focussing on extended and expanded scopes of practice, has been prepared to inform a series of “Evidence and Policy Options” papers. It explores international trends and approaches to the development and implementation of new workforce roles alongside doctors, midwives and n...

Doctors are a vital part of the Pacific health workforce but there is under-supply in rural, remote and outer island settings and in some specialities. Historical models of medical education and training are being challenged by demographic and healthcare needs, changes in medical education provision and rising numbers of overseas-trained medical gr...

There is little evidence that the commissioning of health professionals education and training in the Pacific is guided by population health needs, workforce planning, an informed labour market analysis or forward budgetary projections. The two most significant challenges to commissioning education are the establishment of private sector medical ed...

Accreditation of healthcare professional education programs to international standards would enable Pacific Island countries to ensure that the training of midwives, nurses and physicians meets quality standards and allows for mutual recognition of degrees.

A common registration and licensing system for health professionals in Pacific Island countries (PICs) would ensure patient safety and comparable levels of competence through the application of measurable standards at key stages in an individual’s professional career.

Advanced health practitioners with an extended scope of practice make important contributions to healthcare, either by meeting specific service delivery needs or helping to address an under-supply of doctors, especially in rural, remote and outer island settings. Pacific health workforce planners must now consider the potential impact on existing m...

Virtual environments (VEs) provide an inexpensive way of conducting ecologically valid psychological research. The present study used a VE to demonstrate conditioned suppression, a behavioral model of anxiety, in a first-person perspective video game. During operant training, participants learned to shoot crates to find gold bars and thus score poi...

Alcohol has been consumed by humans for thousands of years, but its biological effects are complex and poorly understood. Similarly, alcoholism is a common and extremely debilitating condition for which there are no truly effective treatments, in part due to our incomplete understanding of the underlying biology of the condition. This chapter descr...

Facilitating the provision of detailed, deep and useful feedback is an important design feature of any educational programme. Here we evaluate feedback provided to medical students completing short transferable skills projects. Feedback quantity and depth were evaluated before and after a simple intervention to change the structure of the feedback-...

This review gives a basic introduction to the biology of protein kinase C, one of the first calcium-dependent kinases to be discovered. We review the structure and function of protein kinase C, along with some of the substrates of individual isoforms. We then review strategies for inhibiting PKC in experimental systems and finally discuss the thera...

Studies using targeted gene deletion in mice have revealed distinct roles for individual isozymes of the protein kinase C (PKC) family of enzymes in regulating sensitivity to various drugs of abuse. These changes in drug sensitivity are associated with altered patterns of drug self-administration. The purpose of this review is to summarize behavior...

The epsilon isoform of protein kinase C (PKCepsilon) has important roles in the function of the cardiac, immune and nervous systems. As a result of its diverse actions, PKCepsilon is the target of active drug-discovery programmes. A major research focus is to identify signalling cascades that include PKCepsilon and the substrates that PKCepsilon re...

We recently validated the N-type calcium channel as a target for the treatment of alcoholism and anxiety. N-type calcium channels are neuronal presynaptic ion channels that regulate neurotransmitter release at many sites in the brain. Mice lacking N-type calcium channels exhibit reduced ethanol consumption and show resistance to the acute intoxicat...

Alcoholism is a progressive disorder that involves the amygdala. Mice lacking protein kinase C epsilon (PKCepsilon) show reduced ethanol consumption, sensitivity and reward. We therefore investigated whether PKCepsilon signaling in the amygdala is involved in ethanol consumption. Local knockdown of PKCepsilon in the amygdala reduced ethanol consump...

The cannabinoid CB1 receptor (CB1) is one of the most abundant G protein-coupled receptors in the brain, but little is known about the mechanisms that modulate CB1 receptor signaling. Here, we show that inhibition or null mutation of the epsilon isozyme of protein kinase C (PKCepsilon) selectively enhances behavioral responses to the CB1 agonist WI...

There is a clear need for new therapeutics to treat alcoholism. Here, we test our hypothesis that selective inhibitors of neuronal calcium channels will reduce ethanol consumption and intoxication, based on our previous studies using knock-out mice and cell culture systems. We demonstrate that pretreatment with the novel mixed N-type and T-type cal...

Ethanol enhances γ-aminobutyrate (GABA) signaling in the brain, but its actions are inconsistent at GABAA receptors, especially at low concentrations achieved during social drinking. We postulated that the ϵ isoform of protein kinase C (PKCϵ) regulates the ethanol sensitivity of GABAA receptors, as mice lacking PKCϵ show an increased behavioral res...

Ethanol enhances γ-aminobutyrate (GABA) signaling in the brain, but its actions are inconsistent at GABAA receptors, especially at low concentrations achieved during social drinking. We postulated that the ϵ isoform of protein kinase C (PKCϵ) regulates the ethanol sensitivity of GABAA receptors, as mice lacking PKCϵ show an increased behavioral res...

Alcohol abuse and addiction are serious global health problems. Tackling these disorders requires an understanding of how ethanol produces its effects. Early cell culture studies implicated the protein kinase C (PKC) family of serine-threonine kinases in mediating both acute and chronic responses to ethanol exposure. More recent studies using trans...

The protein kinase C (PKC) family of serine-threonine kinases has been implicated in behavioral responses to opiates, but little is known about the individual PKC isozymes involved. Here, we show that mice lacking PKCepsilon have increased sensitivity to the rewarding effects of morphine, revealed as the expression of place preference and intraveno...

Determining the intracellular signaling pathways that mediate the rewarding effects of ethanol may help identify drug targets to curb excessive alcohol consumption. Mice lacking the epsilon isoform of protein kinase C (PKCepsilon) voluntarily consumed less ethanol than wild-type mice in two-bottle choice and operant self-administration assays. Decr...

A low level of response to ethanol is associated with increased risk of alcoholism. A major determinant of the level of response is the capacity to develop acute functional tolerance (AFT) to ethanol during a single drinking session. Mice lacking protein kinase C epsilon (PKCepsilon) show increased signs of ethanol intoxication and reduced ethanol...

Recent evidence indicates that ethanol modulates the function of specific intracellular signaling cascades, including those that contain cyclic adenosine 3', 5'-monophosphate (cAMP)-dependent protein kinase A (PKA), protein kinase C (PKC), the tyrosine kinase Fyn, and phospholipase D (PLD). In some cases, the specific components of these cascades a...

Chronic ethanol exposure increases the density of N-type calcium channels in brain. We report that ethanol increases levels of mRNA for a splice variant of the N channel specific subunit alpha1 2.2 that lacks exon 31a. Whole cell recordings demonstrated an increase in N-type current with a faster activation rate and a shift in activation to more ne...

N-type calcium channels are modulated by acute and chronic ethanol exposure in vitro at concentrations known to affect humans, but it is not known whether N-type channels are important for behavioral responses to ethanol in vivo. Here, we show that in mice lacking functional N-type calcium channels, voluntary ethanol consumption is reduced and plac...

Significant numbers of macrophages are present during all stages of dermal wound repair, but the functional significance of these macrophages, especially during the later contraction and remodelling stages of repair, remains unclear. We investigated the effect of macrophages on wound contraction using a novel in vitro model based upon the contracti...