Juxtaposing generic skills development in collaborative knowledge work competences and related pedagogical practices in higher education

Abstract

This study employs the term knowledge work competence to address generic aspects of higher education graduates’ expected learning outcomes. Twenty-eight higher education courses were investigated: 1069 students responded to the Collaborative Knowledge Practices (CKP) questionnaire to rate their self-evaluated competence development. From the same courses, 56 teachers provided descriptions of the course pedagogical practices. First, students’ self-reported generic collaboration competence gains were analyzed statistically for differences between courses. Second, qualitative categorization of the pedagogical practices based on rich description of pedagogical designs and teachers’ reflective responses was carried out. This offered a categorization with elaborated descriptions and a clustering to three types of enacted pedagogical practices. Finally, the study juxtaposed these previous two results to investigate how the pedagogical features were related to students’ self-evaluations on collaboration competence gains. The findings highlighted one cluster of pedagogical practices, collaborative knowledge creation with systematic support for epistemic and group work, as most beneficial for student competence gains. In it, professional ways of working were explicitly modeled and practiced, teacher support for knowledge creation during contact teaching was available, and time was reserved for reflection with students. Such pedagogical practices are important to ensure graduates’ fluent transition to complex knowledge work.

Investigating the Characteristics of Knowledge-Related Learning Assignments in Upper Secondary School

“…Parsons et al [27] used a similar analysis in their study about assignments at the elementary school level and Schoenfeld [62] used the same kind of coding schema. The qualitative levels were quantified from one to four and the frequencies of the codes were compared [64], following the example of Muukkonen et al [7]. Level four represented the most intensive or expertlike pedagogical practices of the investigated characteristics, level one did not include the practices.…”

“…The epistemic challenge of a learning assignment offers opportunities to learn real knowledge and work practices (7). It relates both to the authenticity of practices compared to real-life challenges (discussed in the previous paragraphs), and to the complexity of the problem space.…”

“…In the present study, we built on the approach of knowledge work competence by [6,7], in which "knowledge work competence was structured as object-bound collaboration, integration of personal and collective efforts, development through feedback, persistent development, understanding of different disciplines and related expertise, interdisciplinary collaboration, and using flexible tools and technology" [6] (p. 2084). The approach was applied to investigate higher education practices and emphasise students' competencies for the world of work.…”

The affordances of artificial intelligence-based tools for supporting 21st-century skills:

“…Individuals should approach Internet-based information critically and constantly justify it for their problem-solving (Van Laar et al, 2017). Therefore, in their future professional lives, higher education students might need general and transferable skills, such as problem-solving, creative thinking and collaboration, which are defined as 21st-century skills (Muukkonen et al, 2022;Van Laar et al, 2020).…”

Modeling the effect of postgraduate courses on soft skills: a practical approach

“…There have also been a few studies which investigated the interplay between courses and soft skills. The work by Muukkonen et al (2022) studied the students' self-perceptions towards competence gains in 28 courses from two large Finnish universities. The study showed the effects of courses on skill growth to be statistically significant between courses.…”