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Educators’ experiences with governance in curriculum change processes

In the midst of continuous health professions curriculum reforms, critical questions arise about the extent to which conceptual ideas are actually put into practice. Curricula are often not implemented as intended. An under-explored aspect that might play a role is governance. In light of major curriculum changes, we explored educators' perspectives of the role of governance in the process of translating curriculum goals and concepts into institutionalized curriculum change at micro-level (teacher-student). In three Dutch medical schools, 19 educators with a dual role (teacher and coordinator) were interviewed between March and May 2018, using the rich pictures method. We employed qualitative content analysis with inductive coding. Data collection occurred concurrently with data analysis. Different governance processes were mentioned, each with its own effects on the curriculum and organizational responses. In Institute 1, participants described an unclear governance structure, resulting in implementation chaos in which an abstract educational concept could not be fully realized. In Institute 2, participants described a top-down and strict governance structure contributing to relatively successful implementation of the educational concept. However it also led to demotivation of educators, who started rebelling to recover their perceived loss of freedom. In Institute 3, participants described a relatively fragmentized process granting a lot of freedom, which contributed to contentment and motivation but did not fully produce the intended changes. Our paper empirically illustrates the importance of governance in curriculum change. To advance curriculum change processes and improve their desired outcomes it seems important to define and explicate both hard and soft governance processes.

Narrative recognition and identification: a qualitative pilot study into reading literary texts with advanced cancer patients

This qualitative study describes the experiences of five patients with advanced cancer who participated in a guidedreading and discussion about selected literary texts. The intervention consisted of reading a selected story, after which eachpatient was interviewed, using the reading guide as a conversation template. The interviews were then thematically analyzed fortheir conceptual content using a template analysis.First experiences with our newly developed reading guide designed to support a structured reading of storiescontaining experiences of contingency suggest that it may help patients to express their own experiences of contingency andto reflect on these experiences.

Progress in Reading and Spelling of Dyslexic Children is Not Affected by Executive Functioning

Although poor reading and spelling skills have been associated with weak skills of executive functioning (EF), its role in literacy is not undisputed. Because EF has different theoretical underpinnings, methods of analysis and of assessing EF, it has led to varying and often contrasting results in its effects in children with dyslexia. The present study has two goals. The first goal is to establish the relationship between a large number of EF tasks and reading and spelling skills in a large number of Dutch dyslexic children (n = 229). More interesting, however, is the second aim. To what extent do EF skills predict progress in reading and spelling in dyslexic children who attend a remediation program? The results reveal small, but significant relationships between EF and reading and spelling skills, but no relationships between EF and progress in reading and spelling. It is concluded that training EF skills is unlikely to enhance reading and spelling skills.

E-readers are for Reading

The art of the possible: an insider analysis of change processes within a Dutch teaching university

Insider ethnographic analysis is used to analyze change processes in an engineering department. Distributed leadership theory is used as conceptual framework.

Deeper reading of poetry and prose

The main result of this effectiveness study is that a reading program with a focus on students’ poetry reading processes, based on observational learning via eye movement modeling examples, can improve students’ reading comprehension for different text types. In a pretest-posttest design with an experimental group (ten classes) and a control group (five classes), students’ self-efficacy regarding their own reading process and their reading comprehension were measured. Over a six-week period, teachers of Dutch and their students worked with the six experimental lessons, instead of the regular reading program: students observed and evaluated contrasting peer reading processes, reflected on differences with their own reading process, and then they practiced aspects of a deep reading process. The program resulted in significant progress in the reading comprehension of “expository texts” (ES = .66), “short stories” (ES = .66), and especially “poetry” (ES = .81). Furthermore, the self-efficacy test results show that students in the experimental condition experienced significantly more learning effect after the intervention period than those in the control group. Moreover, based on the learning reports, evaluation tasks and interviews, it appears that the participants in the innovative program have become aware of their reading and how they improved their performance.