Page 28 - Innovative Professional Development Methods and Strategies for STEM Education

The Role of the Professional Doctorate in Developing Professional Practice in STEM Subjects

care. Again, many of the initiatives are context specific but through the dissemination to the health com-
munity it allows people to examine the initiatives and reflect on the applicability to their practice. Many
of our candidates have had acknowledgement of their work around the ways in which it has stimulated
development across arrange of settings.
No account of the health service would be complete without acknowledgement of re-organisation
which takes place with increasing frequency. In practice this means many people changing their jobs and
while this neither may nor may not be positive experiences, it does have implications for the professional
doctorate. It means many projects coming to an end and an interesting and well developed project com-
ing to sudden and abrupt halt. Most respond well to the challenge and refocus, one lesson many learn
is it is not the actual project which is the focus and centrality of the doctorate but the underlying theme
which can be continued albeit in another form.
An Engineering Academic Reflects on Undertaking a Professional Doctorate

This section is a brief reflection on the impact on my career and on my professional practice as a result
of completing my professional doctorate. In my doctorate I examined the ways in which formative
feedback could be used to enhance student learning in the STEM subjects – particularly in computing.
The professional doctorate has had a significant impact on my career, my academic practice in teaching
STEM subjects, my academic practice in the way that I provide feedback and the ways that I assess, my
standing in the academic community (both STEM community and Educational Development commu-
nity) and directly in the ways that I undertake supervision of my own professional doctorate students.
The main contribution to the body of knowledge that I presented from my professional doctorate was
a critical analysis of the Assessment for Learning (AfL) “movement” which had a strong momentum at
the time and to present different priorities in assessment and feedback to those presented by AfL. The
research undertaken in professional doctorate thesis showed that whilst students are concerned about
the feedback that they get as part of their learning there are also a number of problematic issues with the
provision of formative feedback in STEM learning environments. The evidence from my thesis suggested
that the link between formative feedback and student achievement is not as conclusive as suggested in
the AfL literature and is difficult to measure effectively.
Many of the issues associated with assessment and feedback have been raised in the wide body of
literature on assessment and feedback, but the research in my professional doctorate provided evidence
to suggest that the relationship between feedback and improved student learning was not straightforward.
The results from my case studies were unique in that the case studies were set in the Computing subject
area and very little of the AfL work up to that point had been done in Computing. The case studies
provided evidence which was different from the majority of mainstream views on the impact of feed-
back. As a result my findings were of interest to practitioners in Higher Education, STEM practitioners,
educational policy makers and students.
Output from my case studies suggested that students wanted generic skills feedback rather than
subject specific feedback or feedback that corrected mistakes (a practice found to be common in STEM
subjects). This finding contradicted one of the pillars from the AfL literature where it was suggested
that feedback should be subject specific. The rationale for students wanting academic skills development
feedback rather than subject specific feedback that came out of my professional doctorate was that this
was learning that they could carry forward and apply to their future learning and future assessments. In

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