There is no reference point currently available to the Irish police force (An Garda Síochána) for measurement of baseline physical fitness or for tracking its current members, as no such data exists. Currently there is no defined health and fitness policy or strategy following a trainee Irish police force two year training period. Measurements of the various health-related components of physical fitness have been developed and, in some cases, standardised, with good to excellent accuracy and reliability (American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM, 2011), as physiological measures (as a proxy for actual physical fitness) with predictive accuracy of an individual's health outcomes better than physical activity recall (Bovet et al., 2007). These measures were utilised within this research to ascertain if there were fitness changes within a group of Irish police force trainees during their period in college training. An improvement was predicted for the trainee group that was at odds with the actual findings. The focus of this particular study is to provide the information to establish if there is a need for mandatory health and fitness testing (while allowing for individual differences) for this unique Irish work force.
This article reports on a small-scale research project (n=56) that investigated student educational gain. For the purposes of this study, gain is defined as an increase in the score that students obtain for pre/post intervention tests. Students received authentic exposure to the process via a web-delivered problem-based scenario. The students were randomly allocated to case and control groups. No statistically significant differences in educational gain were recorded between the two groups. However, the research highlights the requirement to fully integrate problem-based learning (PBL) work into a curriculum. It also confirms findings from other research that students engage well with PBL and enjoy the learning process using this methodology.
A small group of new academic developers reflected on their induction into the profession and wondered if things could have been done differently. The researchers decided to question the directors of three tertiary academic development units about how they recruited new developers, what skills and competences they looked for and how they inducted new appointees into the role. This article interrogates the interview data, employing Winter's 'dilemma analysis' to tease out the ambiguities, judgments and problems inherent in the issues of employing new academic developers. Finally, the authors discuss ways of enhancing the induction experience for new academic developers.
Flexible, Distance and Online Learning (FDOL) is an open online course offered as an informal cross-institutional collaboration based on a postgraduate module in the context of teacher education in higher education. The second iteration, FDOL132, was offered in 2013 using a problem-based learning (PBL) design (FISh) to foster collaborative learning. How this was experienced by participants and how it affected learning within facilitated small groups are explored in this paper. Findings show that authentic learning in groups can be applied directly to practice, and greater flexibility and a focus on the process of collaborative learning has the potential to increase engagement and learning.
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