Rola Ajjawi

Rola Ajjawi
Deakin University · Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning

BAppSc(Physio) Hons, PhD

About

193
Publications
58,513
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
6,964
Citations
Additional affiliations
April 2011 - July 2015
University of Dundee
Position
  • Senior Lecturer in Medical Education
Description
  • Curriculum development and delivery, higher research degree supervision and research

Publications

Publications (193)
Article
Objective This paper, using video‐reflexive ethnography (VRE) as a case study, explores the prospects for and possibilities of observational research in workplace learning. Methods Focusing on VRE methodology and drawing on its principles of care, collaboration, exnovation (paying attention to existing strengths) and reflexivity, we elaborate the...
Article
Background Learning in clinical settings occurs through engagement in everyday activities and interactions. Yet, clinical settings are complex, dynamic environments and data collection methods such as interviews and focus groups, although valuable, alone may not capture the complexities of these settings. Qualitative observational research offers a...
Chapter
This book examines university teaching to encourage a move away from the singular lens of neoliberalism towards more a pluralistic stance that inspires a healthy diversity of theories and practices.University teaching is dominated by neoliberal cultures of measurement, consumerism and deficit, generating a monocultural narrative that disenfranchise...
Article
Full-text available
What equity, diversity and inclusion issues are commented upon by Med Educ's reviewers? This commentary offers an analysis and recommendations for authors, reviewers and editors alike.
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Becoming a general practitioner (or family medicine specialist) is challenging, as trainees learn to manage complex and ambiguous situations. Feedback is a key component of this learning. Although research has tended to focus on feedback's momentary processes and impacts, there is value in seeking to understand the work it does over ti...
Article
Full-text available
The global push towards widening participation for equity cohorts, including students with disabilities, is promising, but it is yet to translate into improved employment experiences. In this commentary, we highlight what higher education institutions must now do to drive meaningful change and better support students with disabilities’ workforce tr...
Article
Introduction Practising medicine exposes physicians to emotionally difficult situations, which can be devastating, and for which they might be unprepared. Informal peer support has been recognised as helpful, although this phenomenon is understudied. Hence, it is important to develop a better understanding of the features of helpful informal peer s...
Article
Teaching the guideline multiple! This commentary offers a means of teaching clinical reasoning that takes account of tensions between written guidelines & the messy world of clinical practice
Article
Context Epistemic injustice refers to a wrong done to someone in their capacity as a knower. While philosophers have detailed the pervasiveness of this issue within healthcare, it is only beginning to be discussed by medical educators. The purpose of this article is to expand the field's understanding of this concept and to demonstrate how it can b...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Qualitative approaches have flourished in medical education research. Many research articles use the term ‘lived experience’ to describe the purpose of their study, yet we have noticed contradictory uses and misrepresentations of this term. In this conceptual paper, we consider three sources of these contradictions and misrepresentatio...
Article
Introduction Occupational therapy students need to be ready to work autonomously in a range of environments as soon as they complete their degree. Practice education experiences are considered key to students developing the competencies that autonomous work requires. To function autonomously in practice environments, it is argued that practitioners...
Article
Full-text available
The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted traditional methods of teaching and learning within higher education. But what remained when the pandemic passed? While the majority of the literature explores the shifts during the pandemic, with much speculation about post-pandemic futures, a clear understanding of lasting implications remains elusive...
Article
Full-text available
Context: Assessment plays a key role in competence development and the shaping of future professionals. Despite its presumed positive impacts on learning, unintended consequences of assessment have drawn increasing attention in the literature. Considering professional identities and how these can be dynamically constructed through social interacti...
Article
Full-text available
Clinical supervisors play key roles in facilitating trainee learning. Yet combining that role with patient care complicates both roles. So, we need to know how both roles can effectively co-occur. When facilitating their trainees’ learning through practice, supervisors draw on their skills - clinical and supervisory - and available opportunities in...
Article
Full-text available
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrating into our society. University education needs to maintain its relevance in an AI‐mediated world, but the higher education sector is only beginning to engage deeply with the implications of AI within society. We define AI according to a relational epistemology, where, in the context of a partic...
Chapter
Full-text available
This case study explores the perceptions and experiences of students living with disabilities regarding work integrated learning (WIL) placement during their university study. In our study, students living with disabilities included those with intellectual, learning, physical or sensory disabilities, as well as those who have a mental health, neuro...
Article
Full-text available
The expectation for universities to support students’ employability through work-integrated learning placements demands investigation into how opportunities are inclusive to students from a diversity of backgrounds. In this paper, we explore the experiences of students with disabilities during work placements, drawing on qualitative data collected...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction: Specialty trainees often struggle to understand how well they are performing, and feedback is commonly seen as a solution to this problem. However, medical education tends to approach feedback as acontextual rather than located in a specialty-specific cultural world. This study therefore compares how specialty trainees in surgery and...
Article
People are increasingly able to generate their own health data through new technologies such as wearables and online symptom checkers. However, generating data is one thing, interpreting them another. General practitioners (GPs) are likely to be the first to help with interpretations. Policymakers in the European Union are investing heavily in infr...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Underperformance in clinical environments can be costly and emotional for all stakeholders. Feedback is an important pedagogical strategy for working with underperformance – both formal and informal strategies can make a difference. Feedback is a typical feature of remediation programs, and yet there is little consensus on how feedback...
Article
Full-text available
Transcripts and testamurs serve to confirm the award of a degree but offer limited information on what a student can actually do. This conceptual paper considers the problem of how graduate achievements are represented by universities in typically reductive and limited ways that do not enable student achievements and distinctiveness to be communica...
Chapter
Health professions education and healthcare are complex endeavours. This complexity appears resistant to the reductive approaches that seek to quantify and even qualify problems, let alone finding solutions that lead to categorical improvement. Sociomaterialism is a heterogenous body of work that encompasses multiple theories and positionalities. T...
Article
Full-text available
COVID-19 forced the digitalisation of teaching and learning in a response often described as emergency remote teaching (ERT). This rapid response changed the social, spatial, and temporal arrangements of higher education and required important adaptations from educators and students alike. However, while the literature has examined the constraints...
Article
Full-text available
Modes of feedback such as audio or video are thought to foster relationality because they humanise feedback encounters. Few studies have examined teacher feedback literacies for relationality. This knowledge gap is significant as students want to be seen by their teachers and for their teachers to express care within the feedback encounter. Teacher...
Article
In this commentary, Ajjawi and Gravett examine the role of space in learning and urge the field to research learning spaces from a more theoretically informed position.
Chapter
(a) The aim of this chapter is to present a historical account of feedback conceptualizations and discuss current trends in feedback research and practice. (b) The main concepts show that many definitions of feedback exist which have influenced research and practice, shifting from feedback as information, to feedback as a process that foregrounds t...
Article
Full-text available
The practice of students as partners can be applied to numerous facets of the university, including curriculum design, governance, and co-curricular programs. However, while scholars have also conceptualised that student partnership can occur through co-research, adoption is far from mainstream. In this paper, we seek to go ‘under the hood’ of stud...
Article
Full-text available
Artificial intelligence (AI) holds significant implications for higher education; however, references to AI in the literature are often vague and open to debate. In order to understand how to progress AI-related research and analysis, this critical review systematically searched top higher education journals for references to the term ‘artificial i...
Article
Full-text available
Work-integrated learning (WIL) or university placements are valuable opportunities for students to apply their knowledge in an authentic work setting and help support their transition from university to employment. However, as our study evidenced, students with disability face significant and unique barriers to securing and completing WIL placement...
Article
Full-text available
Numbers of online postgraduate coursework students are increasing within higher education and this raises questions of identity – what being a student means to this more mature cohort. This in-depth qualitative investigation explores postgraduate student identities within online learning. We conducted interviews (14) and collected completed longitu...
Article
Introduction: Fostering trainee psychological safety is increasingly being recognised as necessary for effective feedback conversations. Emerging literature has explored psychological safety in peer learning, formal feedback and simulation debrief. Yet, the conditions required for psychologically safe feedback conversations in clinical contexts, a...
Article
Full-text available
Qualitative research is inherently relational, thus paying attention to subjectivities is important. As researchers, we are fundamentally entangled in the research through the decisions we make about design, the rapport and shaping of interviews to construct the data and the lenses we bring to interpretation and sense making. This is a multivoiced...
Article
Full-text available
Authentic assessment aligns higher education with the practices of students' future professions, which are increasingly digitally mediated. However, previous frameworks for authentic assessment appear not to explicitly address how authenticity intersects with a broader digital world. This critical scoping review describes how the digital has been d...
Article
Full-text available
Assessment has multiple purposes, one of which is to judge if students have met outcomes at the requisite level. Underperformance in assessment is frequently positioned as a problem of the student and attributed to student diversity and/or background characteristics. However, the assessment might also be inequitable and therefore exclude students i...
Article
Full-text available
Assessment plays an important role in higher education, both guiding student learning and judging student success. However, assessment that treats all students the same is inequitable, since it ignores differences in students’ past and present circumstances. A shift to assessment for inclusion is advocated to promote student equity; one that incorp...
Article
Full-text available
As a form of assessment, examinations are designed to determine whether students have met learning outcomes. However, students with disabilities report avoiding examinations, selecting units of study where the assessments align with their strengths. To ensure examinations do not contribute to the systematic exclusion of students with disabilities,...
Article
Full-text available
E-assessment typically seeks to improve assessment designs through the use of innovative digital tools. However, the intersections between digital technologies and assessment can be seen as increasingly complex, particularly as the sociotechnical perspectives suggest assessment must be relevant to a digitally-mediated society. This paper presents a...
Article
Student feedback practices have been primarily discussed within a context of the particular course or unit of study. Little attention has been paid to how students navigate their feedback practices as they progress through different learning contexts and whether they apply known feedback strategies in new settings. To open exploration of this issue...
Article
A taskforce established by Medical Education asks readers to engage in discussion about how the journal and field can do better to ensure that health professional education publishing is inclusive of diverse knowledge and perspectives.
Article
Full-text available
Assessment drives learning and determines success in higher education. In a robust and defensible system, assessment should not exclude based on extraneous student characteristics, particularly as the student body becomes more diverse. This research sought to examine classroom assessment designs that might make assessment inclusive. A critical lite...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Like medicine and healthcare, feedback is a practice imbued with emotions: saturated with feelings relevant to one’s identity and status within a given context. Often this emotional dimension of feedback is cast as an impediment to be ignored or managed. Such a perspective can be detrimental to feedback practices as emotions are fundam...
Article
Aim This review aims to explore the relationship between feedback and evaluative judgement in undergraduate nursing and midwifery education. Background Research in higher education has shown that feedback practices can lead to students’ developing evaluative judgement; thought critical for performance improvement and life-long learning. While lite...
Article
Feedback is justified when it has a positive influence on students’ subsequent performance. Opportunities for student action need therefore to be consciously designed if feedback is to influence learning. In this paper, we discuss how ipsative design of feedback processes, i.e. involving comparison of a student’s current performance with a previous...
Article
Academic failure is commonplace in higher education. Some students persist and go on to complete their courses. However, some do not, and this can create problems for themselves and the institutions in which they are enrolled. If we could understand students’ lived experiences of academic failure and persistence, it may be possible to design strate...
Article
Full-text available
Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) have become ubiquitous as a form of assessment in medical education but involve substantial resource demands and considerable local variation. A detailed understanding of the processes by which OSCEs are designed and administered could improve feasibility and sustainability. This exploration of OSC...
Article
The increasing prominence of neoliberal agendas in international higher education has led to greater weight being ascribed to student satisfaction, and the national surveys through which students evaluate courses of study. In this article, we focus on the evaluation of feedback processes. Rather than the transmission of information from teacher to...
Article
Full-text available
Despite feedback being considered important to learning, its potential is rarely fully realised. Promoting learning through feedback in open-ended written tasks (e.g. essays and reports) is a complex endeavour that requires students who are motivated to identify and utilise appropriate information. We set out to understand the mechanisms that enabl...
Article
Full-text available
This article offers a rethinking of a fundamental area of higher education research and practice: the concept of belonging. Extending the considerable international research attending to belonging, we suggest that normative narratives often contain a number of omissions. Such omissions include a consideration of the experiences of those students wh...
Article
Ever wondered why academics make things so difficult? Ajjawi and Eva explain with their introduction of the 2021 State of the Science issue and this year's theme of Solution‐ism.
Article
Feedback pedagogies and research tend to focus on immediate corrective actions rather than learning for the longer term. This approach means that feedback may not support trainees who are managing complex, competing, and ambiguous practice situations, often with limited supervision. There is an opportunity to consider how feedback can help medical...
Article
Full-text available
IntroductionPatient demographics demand physicians who are competent in and embrace palliative care as part of their professional identity. Published literature describes ways that learners acquire knowledge, skills and attitudes for palliative care. These studies are, however, limited by their focus on the individual where learning is about acquis...
Article
Context Research in health professions education (HPE) spans diverse terrain, which brings richness to our understanding of complex phenomena and challenges us to appreciate different approaches to studying them. To fully appreciate and benefit from this diversity, scholars in HPE must be savvy to the hallmarks of rigor that differ across research...
Chapter
Assessment exists within a series of pedagogical, administrative and technological legacy practices. It tends therefore to reflect the needs and concerns of a previous time. However, this does not align with a digitally enabled world with rapidly expanding information and an increasingly dynamic view of knowledge. This chapter explores how to reima...
Chapter
Graduates must learn to present a version of themselves that aligns with the expectations and norms of their discipline or profession, organisations in which they might work and the public at large; and to be able to adapt as they change careers and workplaces. Persona studies offers a lens for reimagining more authentic forms of assessment design,...
Article
Background: A range of research methods have been used to understand effective workplace learning in the health professions. The impact of findings from this research usually requires knowledge translation activities in the form of faculty development initiatives, such as supervisor workshops. Far rarer, but with greater potential, are research ap...
Article
The imperative to legitimise qualitative research approaches is not new. Indeed, in the 1960’s Glaser and Strauss published their book on grounded theory ‘to help provide a defense’ for researchers engaging in ‘creative’ qualitative studies.1, p7 Similarly, in this issue, Andreassen et al.2 bring the notion of focused ethnography to the medical edu...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter provides a commentary on the potential choices, processes, and decisions involved in undertaking a systematic review. It does this through using an illustrative case example, which draws on the application of systematic review principles at each stage as it actually happened. The chapter firstly introduces the topic of ‘student engagem...
Book
This book is the first to explore the big question of how assessment can be refreshed and redesigned in an evolving digital landscape. There are many exciting possibilities for assessments that contribute dynamically to learning. However, the interface between assessment and technology is limited. Often, assessment designers do not take advantage o...
Article
Background: The notion of culture is increasingly invoked in the medical education literature as a key influence on how educational strategies unfold, and culture change is frequently identified as a necessary precursor to progress. A meaningful perspective on what culture means is often missing from these discussions, however. Without a theoretic...
Article
Full-text available
Ensuring student success has long been on the research agenda in higher education. In this study, we seek to understand if the changes students make in light of academic failure are consistent with this literature. Little is known about students who fail but subsequently persist in their studies. Through an online survey with students who had faile...
Article
Sociomaterial perspectives in research are those that encourage researchers to focus their inquiry on the relationships between people (social) and things (material), rather than focusing solely on people. The unique possibility of sociomaterial perspectives is increasingly recognized in health professions education scholarship. In an effort to sup...
Chapter
This chapter provides an orientation to research approaches in surgical education. Education research seeks to deepen the knowledge and understanding of learning and pedagogy. We start with highlighting common research paradigms. Beliefs about knowledge and reality influence research questions and design, and so it is important to be aware of these...
Article
This paper offers a critical and theoretical exploration of the contemporary use of standards in assessment in higher education. It outlines three discourses of assessment standards. Each perspective foregrounds particular realities and backgrounds others, and so influences practice in particular taken-for-granted ways. The assumptions of these per...
Article
Full-text available
Academic failure is an important and personal event in the lives of university students, and the ways they make sense of experiences of failure matters for their persistence and future success. Academic failure contributes to attrition, yet the extent of this contribution and precipitating factors of failure are not well understood. To illuminate t...
Chapter
This chapter offers a useful overview of the purpose, development and structure of this book on feedback impact. It begins by touching on the reason for this book and then provides an outline of the process of how the editors and authors worked together to break new ground. We then explain the structure of the book—describing the five parts: feedba...
Chapter
The feedback literature has a habit of treating emotion as a form of interference. Therefore many guidelines for improving practice are geared towards reducing learners’ emotions so that messages can “get through” and take root. In this chapter, we present a case for a re-orientation of how we conceive the role of emotion in feedback. We use a soci...
Chapter
This chapter focuses on influences, affordances and challenges for teachers in designing for (and identifying) feedback impact. We propose four key questions that need to be asked: Do learners know the purpose of feedback and their role(s) in it? Can learners make sense of the information? Can learners take action? What effects should we be looking...
Chapter
This chapter discusses researching feedback inputs and processes to examine effects. Specifically, we promote a research agenda that contributes an understanding of how feedback works, for particular learners, in particular circumstances through research designs that take account of theory, occur in naturalistic settings and focus on students’ sens...
Chapter
This chapter offers new insight regarding the theoretical, methodological and practical concerns relating to feedback in higher education. It begins with the construction of a new definition of feedback. We explain how feedback is a learner-centred process in which impact is a core feature. The chapter then explores the reasons why identifying, let...
Chapter
This chapter argues that researchers must look beyond narrow and simple notions of feedback impact in educational practice. It draws comparisons with what has occurred within student engagement research. This illustrates the challenges of researching a phenomenon that lacks conceptual clarity and hence gives rise to a range of contradictory measure...
Article
Context: Research suggests that feedback in the health professions is less useful than we would like. In this paper, we argue that feedback has become reliant on myths that perpetuate unproductive rituals. Feedback often resembles a discrete episode of an educator "telling," rather than an active and iterative involvement of the learner in a futur...
Article
Full-text available
‘Transparency’ is frequently invoked when describing assessment criteria in higher education. However, there are limitations to the metaphor: ‘transparent’ representations give the illusion that everything can (and should) be explicated, and that students are ‘seeing through’ to the educators’ expectations. Drawing from sociomaterial perspectives o...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Supporting medical students’ and junior doctors’ development in busy clinical settings is challenging. As opportunities for developing trainees, for example, traditional bedside teaching, are decreasing, teaching outside of clinical practice is increasing. However, evidence suggests that effective learning through practice arises via a...
Article
Work-integrated learning (WIL) is a feature of university courses, both in professional areas, where it is commonplace, but also across many different disciplines. Assessment of WIL can be complex as it involves parties and settings external to the university, and it can be problematic because of difficulties in aligning learning activities during...
Article
Full-text available
Medical education is a messy tangle of social and material elements. These material entities include tools, like curriculum guides, stethoscopes, cell phones, accreditation standards, and mannequins; natural elements, like weather systems, disease vectors, and human bodies; and, objects, like checklists, internet connections, classrooms, lights, ch...
Article
Full-text available
Ajjawi highlights tensions regarding research quality in diverse fields such as medical education. Is open peer‐review the answer?
Book
This book asks how we might conceptualise, design for and evaluate the impact of feedback in higher education. Ultimately, the purpose of feedback is to improve what students can do: therefore, effective feedback must have impact. Students need to be actively engaged in seeking, sense-making and acting upon any information provided to them in order...
Article
Full-text available
The Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is a ubiquitous part of medical education, although there is some debate about its value, particularly around possible impact on learning. Literature and research regarding the OSCE is most often situated within the psychometric or competency discourses of assessment. This paper describes an alte...
Article
Full-text available
The notion of “transparency” has been extensively critiqued with respect to higher education. These critiques have serious implications for how educators may think about, develop, and work with assessment criteria. This conceptual paper draws from constructivist and post-structural critiques of transparency to challenge two myths associated with as...
Article
Full-text available
In the latest installment of the “When I say…” series, Ajjawi and Regehr assert that the term feedback should be reserved for a dynamic and co constructive process in a shared social or cultural space.
Article
Full-text available
Objective To better understand the potential of a needs assessment approach using qualitative data from manikin-based and virtual patient simulation debriefing sessions compared with traditional data collection methods (ie, focus groups and interviews). Design Original data from simulation debrief sessions was compared and contrasted with data fro...
Article
In the latest installment of the “When I say…” series, Ajjawi and Regehr assert that the term feedback should be reserved for a dynamic and co constructive process in a shared social or cultural space.

Network

Cited By