Undergraduate Researcher Stories: Insights for Mentoring in an Open and Distance Learning Context

Silva, Radhika De; Devendra, Dinali

doi:10.1177/00220574211032579

Cited by 1 publication

(3 citation statements)

References 25 publications

(44 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…According to the Thematic Analysis conducted here [75] on 146 students, four main categories, three corresponding to soft skills and one corresponding with project chal-lenges, emerged from the students' self-assessed development and experiences during their teamwork project: Each of the first three themes was considered as developed skills or positive experiences by students. While many of these skills and experiences can be found in the literature, the most frequently mentioned skill/experience in this project was friendship and relationship development.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Student reflections can be a valuable source of qualitative data, especially for education research [72,73]. Indeed, previous research has shown the value of qualitative research on undergraduates' perceptions [74,75]. Analyzing students' open reflections, without questions to direct them, allowed us to collect data without bias and find what students had experienced most saliently.…”

Section: Data Collection and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To analyze students' reflections, we chose the Thematic Analysis method [75]. The data were analyzed thematically according to Braun and Clarke's six steps in qualitative data analysis: familiarizing (yourself) with data, generating initial codes, searching for themes, reviewing themes, defining themes, and writing the results [76].…”

Section: Data Collection and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Teamwork Made in China: Soft Skill Development with a Side of Friendship in the STEM Classroom

Van Horne,

Rakedzon

2024

Education Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

One demand imposed by the global market is the possession of adequate soft skills, a challenge commonly faced by STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduates. This challenge is particularly prominent in China, which produces millions of STEM graduates annually. Consequently, there is a pressing need to develop and research programs facilitating the acquisition of soft skills, with a specific focus on teamwork, among Chinese engineers. To this end, we created a team-based project as part of a semester-long scientific English communication course at a Sino–foreign STEM university in China. The project aimed at fostering valuable soft skills through active learning, including teamwork, communication, and collaboration. In this report, we examine written reflections by students, aiming to assess their perceptions of soft skill development and overall experience resulting from their participation in the team-based project. Our results show the self-reflected soft skills development was considerable, and, unexpectedly, a noteworthy outcome of the project was the significant development of interpersonal connections, resulting in a positive experience and friendship development. Consequently, the findings of this study shed light on how teamwork can foster soft skills and friendship development, the latter often referred to as relationship development, another soft skill in the 21st century.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%