One way in which universities have sought to articulate the outcomes of a university education is through a description of the attributes of their graduates. Recent calls for universities to demonstrate the quality of their outcomes and processes have prompted a re-examination of the generic graduate attribute outcomes many Australian universities have espoused for the past decade. As university communities struggle to identify what combination of skills, attributes and knowledge to include in these statements of graduate outcomes, and begin to come to terms with how to develop curricula to effectively achieve these outcomes, the fundamental nature of these outcomes is a vital preliminary question to address. What are these things that universities call generic graduate attributes? This is a more fundamental question than what combination of skills, attributes and knowledge should be included on the graduate 'shopping-list', it is about the nature of the things on the list, and the nature of the list itself. In seeking to further our understanding of the meaning of generic graduate attributes, the research described in this paper used phenomenographic analysis to explore academics' conceptions of generic graduate attributes in the context of contemporary teaching and learning practices at one Australian university. A way of describing the key aspects of the variation in academics' understandings of the concept of graduate attributes is presented. The contribution of discipline background to conceptions of generic attributes is considered and the implications of the observed variation for universities' current curriculum reform initiatives discussed.

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For many years universities around the world have sought to articulate the nature of the education they offer to their students through a description of the generic qualities and skills their graduates possess. Despite the lengthy history of the rhetoric of such policy claims, universities' endeavours to describe generic attributes of graduates continue to lack a clear theoretical or conceptual base and are characterized by a plurality of view-points. Furthermore, despite extensive funding in some quarters, overall, efforts to foster the development of generic attributes appear to have met with limited success. Recent research has shed some light on this apparent variability in policy and practice. It is apparent that Australian university teachers charged with responsibility for developing students' generic graduate attributes do not share a common understanding of either the nature of these outcomes, or the teaching and learning processes that might facilitate the development of these outcomes. Instead academics hold qualitatively different conceptions of the phenomenon of graduate attributes. This paper considers how the qualitatively different conceptions of graduate attributes identified in this research have been applied to the challenge of revising a university's policy statement specifying the generic attributes of its graduates. The paper outlines the key findings of the research and then describes how the university's revision of its policy statement has built upon this research, adopting a research-led approach to academic development. The resultant twotiered policy is presented and the key academic development processes associated with the disciplinary contextualization of this framework are considered. The discussion explores some of the implications of this novel approach to structuring a university's policy, in particular, the variation in the relationship between discipline knowledge and generic attributes which was a key feature of the qualitative variation in understandings identified in the research.

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Advantages with respect to patient care, teaching, and administrative productivity were identified for each learning experience. From the perspective of the students, the cooperative learning experience appeared to provide additional educational benefits.

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