Children attending hospital for a clinical procedure such as a scan or blood test can experience anxiety and uncertainty. Children who are informed and supported before and during procedures tend to have a more positive experience. Despite this, there is a lack of empirical evidence directly from children around how they would like to be supported before, during and after a procedure. This qualitative study used improvised drama workshops to investigate children’s ( n = 15, aged 7–14 years) perceptions and opinions of attending hospital for a procedure and what would help them have a positive encounter. Children portrayed themselves as having a small presence during a hospital procedure, depicted by the two themes of ‘having to be brave but feeling scared inside’ and ‘wanting to get involved but being too afraid to ask’. Within both themes, children described how the directive and reassuring language and actions used by health professionals and parents marginalized their contributions. This study shows that children attending hospital for procedures value the opportunity to have a presence and active role, to express their emotions, join in interactions and be involved in making choices about their care.

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations are projected to grow over two times faster than the total for all occupations in the next decade. This will require reskilling and upskilling those currently in the workforce. In response, many universities are deliberately developing academic programs and individual courses focused on providing relevant skills that can be transferred to the workplace. In turn, developers of such programs and courses need ways to assess how well the skills taught in their courses translate to the workforce. Our framework, Course Assessment for Skill Transfer (CAST), is a suite of conceptual tools intended to aid course designers, instructors, or external evaluators in assessing which essential skills are being taught and to what extent. The overarching aim of the framework is to support skills transfer from the classroom to the workplace. This paper introduces the framework and provides two illustrative examples for applying the framework. The examples show that the framework offers a customizable structure for course facilitators and evaluators to assess the skills taught, learned, and retained based on their needs and the resources available to evaluate the quality and usefulness of course offerings in higher education.

Guiding Question 1: Will Kindergarten and 3rd grade teachers consider XAL instructional units to be to be valuable overall and valuable for student learning, engagement, and question-asking skill development?.

This report serves the formative evaluation of ARC-Learn. The goal of this document is to support the use of evidence to inform programmatic changes and improvements for year two of the program, during which time Cohort One will complete its second year and Cohort Two will complete its first year of activities.

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