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 this world-wide problem, we analysed institutional data at a large, comprehensive Australian university and surveyed 186 undergraduate students who had failed at least one unit of study in 2016, but were still enrolled in 2017. Academic failure increased the likelihood of course attrition by 4.2 times. The students who failed and persisted attributed academic failure to a confluence of dispositional, situational, and institutional factors. There was a compounded effect of academic failure on already-vulnerable students resulting in strong negative emotions. Viewing persistence as an interaction between individuals and their sociocultural milieu opens up different avenues for research and considerations for support.

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 failed and persisted, we identified drivers for persistence and how students adapted in response to academic failure. Thematic analysis showed that the majority of students did not seek institutional support following academic failure but they did seek support from peers, family and friends. These adaptations occurred at multiple levels: dispositional, situational and institutional. Drivers reported were internal (desire to complete) and external (desire to meet expectations). Although the majority of our students showed positive adaptations following academic failure, a significant portion reported no changes to their academic strategies. The paper poses the question of how students who fail can be better supported to continue successfully.

The nature of healthcare means doctors must continually calibrate the quality of their work within constantly changing standards of practice. As trainees move into working as fully qualified professionals, they can struggle to know how well they are practising in the absence of formal oversight. They therefore need to build their evaluative judgement: their capability to interpret cues and messages from the clinical environment, allowing them to judge quality of practice. This paper explores how Australian general practice (GP) trainees develop their evaluative judgement. We interviewed 16 GPs, who had recently completed certification requirements, asking them how they managed complex learning challenges across their training trajectory. A thematic analysis was sensitised by conceptualisations of evaluative judgement and feedback for future practice. Findings are reported via three themes: sources of performance relevant information; sense-making about progress within complex learning challenges; and changing practice as evaluative judgement develops. Trainees actively sought to understand what quality practice looked like within complex and ambiguous circumstances but often found it difficult to calibrate their performance. While reflective practice was key to developing evaluative judgment, feedback conversations could provide significant opportunities for trainees and supervisors to co-construct meaning. A 'feedback community' was available for frequent instances where supervisors were absent or not regarded as entirely credible, although feedback conversations in themselves did not necessarily assist trainees to develop evaluative judgement. There is room for a more active role for supervisors in assisting trainees to consider how to independently make sense of learning cues.

Online role plays, as they are designed for use in higher education in Australia and internationally, are active and authentic learning activities (Wills, Leigh & Ip, 2011

Role play is an increasingly popular technique in tertiary education, being student centred, constructivist and suitable for a range of subject areas. The choice of formats is wide open, with options ranging from the traditional face to face performance through to multi-user online computer games. Some teachers prefer to take advantage of features of both online and face to face formats and offer a blended form. This case study describes an innovative blended role play in which the online component plays a small but important part. The findings show that decisions on not only how to make the best use of technology but also how to design and facilitate a role play can have a profound effect on the creation of an engaging first-person story from which powerful learning can be drawn-in this case, learning outcomes including deep insights into strengths and weaknesses of participants' personal change management styles.