Velda Mccune

University of Edinburgh | UoE · Institute for Academic Development

This article characterizes and evaluates the development of an accredited, in-house faculty-based teaching recognition scheme aimed at supporting clinicians and academics to achieve Advance HE Fellowship recognition. The scheme takes 6 to 24 months to complete and forms part of an institution-wide scheme. The evaluation covered 44 months collecting...

This paper reports on teachers’ perspectives on preparing students for working with ‘wicked’ problems (Rittel and Webber [1973]. ‘Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.’ Policy Sciences 4 (2): 155–169.). These problems are complex, lack clear boundaries, and attempts to solve them – generally by bringing together multiple stakeholders with contr...

Understanding depends on applying a particular kind of effort to learning. The research reported in this article investigates what influences students’ willingness to engage in the kinds of active learning which would be required for a deep personal understanding of the “ways of thinking and practising” of their subject area. The analysis is based...

This paper investigates how academics in the current global higher education system – which often prioritises metrics of research activity and income generation over rich conceptualisation of transformative teaching – can sustain identities that encompass deep care for teaching. This is a significant area that has been little researched, particular...

Institutional schemes that offer financial and other support to carry out Scholarship of Teaching and Learning projects have a valuable part to play in the personal and professional development of academic staff. We investigated the experiences of 12 recipients of the University of Edinburgh Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Scheme awards...

This paper focuses on extending our limited understanding of how the teaching and assessment practices of experienced academics develop. The development of academics as teachers is increasingly seen as a key focus but much of the research in this area has focused on formal educational development initiatives. The analysis presented here investigate...

This paper considers relationships between approaches to learning, learner identities, self-efficacy beliefs and academic achievement in higher education. In addition to already established survey instruments, a new scale, subject area affinity, was developed. The scale explores the extent to which students identify with their area of study and ima...

The relationships between university students’ academic achievement and their approaches to learning and studying continuously attract scholarly attention. We report the results of an analysis in which multilevel linear modelling was used to analyse data from 3,626 Danish university students. Controlling for the effects of age, gender, and progress...

This paper explores the transitions that a group of students, admitted from further education colleges as part of broader widening access initiative at a Scottish research-intensive university, made across the lifetime of their degrees. It investigates how they negotiate their learning careers beyond the first year, and how they (re)define their ap...

Velda McCune and Susan Rhind again stress the importance of students’ active involvement in guidance and feedback processes. For students in domains of professional study, they consider how such active involvement can build their identities as legitimate professional practitioners and maximise the impact of their learning experiences on their futur...

This article acknowledges the value of using communities of practice as a perspective to illuminate learning and teaching in higher education but argues that preceding work has given insufficient attention to: the particular kinds of trajectories, commitments and intentions displayed by the participants in undergraduate courses; the knowledge pract...

A re-analysis of several university-level interview studies has suggested that some students show evidence of a deep and stable approach to learning, along with other characteristics that support the approach. This combination, it was argued, could be seen to indicate a disposition to understand for oneself. To identify a group of students who show...

This article considers how best to conceptualise higher education curricula in a world marked by uncertainty, where knowledge and the foundations of knowledge are strongly contested. We then draw on conceptions of agency that derive from socio-cultural theorising to consider what ‘tools’ for thinking and practising individuals may need to deploy if...

This paper draws on a longitudinal study of students who entered an ancient Scottish university directly from further education colleges (FECs) to discuss the role that different assessment regimes played in their university careers. It illuminates aspects of learning from feedback from the perspective of students whose pre-university experiences o...

The development of the Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students (ASSIST) is reported, which incorporates a revised version of the Approaches to Studying Inventory. This questionnaire was completed by three separate samples; 1284 mainly first-year students from six British universities, 466 first-year students from a Scottish technological...

This article discusses the need, in 21st century university education, to encourage a ‘will to learn’ in students, and explores its meaning using a variety of empirical evidence. It draws on previous studies related to academic understanding to introduce the idea of a disposition to understand for oneself and to consider how teaching–learning envir...

This study analysed the expectations and experiences of students on a five-year undergraduate (n = 91) and four-year graduate entry (n = 47) veterinary medicine degree programme relating to academic feedback. Qualitative and quantitative methodologies were used to explore new students’ expectations and prior experiences of feedback and capture expe...

This article discusses the need, in 21st century university education, to encourage a ‘will to learn’ in students, and explores its meaning using a variety of empirical evidence. It draws on previous studies related to academic understanding to introduce the idea of a disposition to understand for oneself and to consider how teaching–learning envir...

This paper reviews findings from a longitudinal study of students making the transition from FE to an ancient university. This paper compares the younger and older students' reasons for higher education study. Our analysis of the quantitative data suggests that the older students had different reasons for entering university. We use the qualitative...

Recent literature in higher and adult education has identified ‘authenticity’ in teaching as a significant yet under-researched phenomenon lacking a straight-forward definition. By exploring how academic teachers and their students, next to educational theorists and philosophers, understand the notion of authenticity in teaching we offer this empir...

In 2004, as part of its initiative to widen access, a Scottish university offered places for the first time to a group of students coming from further education (FE) colleges with Higher National Certificates (HNCs) and Higher National Diplomas (HNDs). A longitudinal study has followed the experiences of transition and subsequent progression of thi...

The research reported in this article investigates what students perceive as influencing their willingness to engage actively with their studies. The semi‐structured interviews which form the basis of this analysis are a subset of the data from the Enhancing Teaching–Learning Environments in Undergraduate Courses (ETL) Project, a large‐scale projec...

Accounts of emotion and affect have gained popularity in studies of learning. This article draws on qualitative research with a group of non-traditional students entering an elite university in the UK to illustrate how being and becoming a university student is an intrinsically emotional process. It argues that feelings of loss and dislocation are...

The paper presents research findings on students’ experiences of the provision both of guidance and feedback, and with respect to examinations as well as coursework assignments. A first‐ and a final‐year bioscience course unit were surveyed in each of three contrasting university departments. The resulting dataset comprised 782 completed student qu...

“Authenticity in teaching” has been recognized as an important yet under-researched phenomenon. To gain greater insight into the meaning of authenticity in teaching in adult and higher education settings, the authors delved into some of the philosophical and educational literature on authenticity, giving particular attention, but not confining thei...

This paper reports on the first phase of a study of the experiences of a small group of students (35) that have entered an ‘elite’ Scottish university directly from Further Education (FE) colleges where they have studied Higher National Certificate and Diploma courses. Students’ experiences were gathered through in‐depth interviews and a standardis...

The paper presents research findings on students' experiences of the provision both of guidance and feedback, and with respect to examinations as well as coursework assignments. In the work reported, a first- and a final-year bioscience course unit were surveyed in each of three contrasting university departments by means of questionnaires and inte...

Findings are presented from an ongoing study of three final-year, honours-level course units in the biosciences with a combined intake of 85 students. The data on which the analysis draws comprise semi-structured interviews with students together with findings from an Experiences of Teaching and Learning Questionnaire. The investigation forms part...

At the 2003 EARLI Conference in Padova, we presented a symposium paper which discussed the findings of a study of three final-year courses in Biology. While the first part of those findings examined the development by the students of characteristic ways of thinking and practising in biology as a discipline, the second part of the findings highlight...

This article describes the historical origins and development of a series of well-known study strategy inventories and seeks to identify their conceptual bases. The theories and evidence influencing the development of 6 contrasting instruments are considered before examining empirical evidence of similarities and differences between the measurement...

Findings are presented from a small-scalelongitudinal study of first-year psychologystudents' learning. Three developmentalhierarchies were derived in the analysis of theinterview data, which described differentaspects of the variation in students' accountsof their conceptions of essay writing. Althoughthe findings did suggest that the students mad...

Abstract This presentation will consider the implications of findings from a UK-wide research project, for understanding how,high-quality learning may,be encouraged,in higher,education. The aim of the,Enhancing,Teaching- Learning Environments,(ETL) project is to develop,conceptual,frameworks,and analytic tools to guide the development,of teaching-l...

This report describes the early stages of a research study funded by the British Economic and Social Research Council within a major national research programme (Teaching and Learning Research Council). The project was designed to investigate ways of Enhancing Teaching-Learning Environments in undergraduate courses (ETL project). The researchers ca...

This paper introduces work on a major ongoing research project being carried out collaboratively between Edinburgh, Durham and Coventry Universities in Britain. The main concepts and conceptual frameworks being used in the project are introduced, along with a brief summary of a literature review used to define the most salient aspects of teachingle...

The development of the Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students (ASSIST) is reported, which incorporates a revised version of the Approaches to Studying Inventory. This questionnaire was completed by three separate samples; 1284 mainly first-year students from six British universities, 466 first-year students from a Scottish technological...

This chapter introduces a set of concepts that have been developed to describe how students learn and study at university and to explain the influences on the quality of learning outcomes. The conceptual framework derives from ideas introduced by F. Marten and colleagues in Gothenburg, and since taken up by research groups and staff developers in m...

This paper summarises previous research into approaches to learning and studying before reporting a small-scale longitudinal interview study of first-year psychology students' approaches. This qualitative investigation looked in depth at how students tackled their learning within a single discipline, and created fine-grained categories to describe...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Edinburgh, 2001.