2018 Frederic W. Ness Book Award, AAC&U How can educators ensure that young people who attain a postsecondary credential are adequately prepared for the future? Matthew T. Hora and his colleagues explain that the answer is not simply that students need more specialized technical training to meet narrowly defined employment opportunities. Beyond the Skills Gap challenges this conception of the “skills gap,” highlighting instead the value of broader twenty-first-century skills in postsecondary education. They advocate for a system in which employers share responsibility along with the education sector to serve the collective needs of the economy, society, and students. Drawing on interviews with educators in two- and four-year institutions and employers in the manufacturing and biotechnology sectors, the authors demonstrate the critical importance of habits of mind such as problem solving, teamwork, and communication. They go on to show how faculty and program administrators can create active learning experiences that develop students’ skills across a range of domains. The book includes in-depth descriptions of eight educators whose classrooms exemplify the effort to blend technical learning with the cultivation of twenty-first-century habits of mind. The study, set in Wisconsin, takes place against the backdrop of heated political debates over the role of public higher education. This thoughtful and nuanced account, enriched by keen observations of postsecondary instructional practice, promises to contribute new insights to the rich literature on workforce development and to provide valuable guidance for postsecondary faculty and administrators.

Developed in the context of health sciences education in the late 1960s, problem-based learning (PBL) is now widely deployed as an education methodology. Its problem-solving, collaborative, student-centred ethos is seen as a more appropriate system of pedagogy than earlier ‘chalk-and-talk’ modes. Focusing on its use in clinical education, this collection of recent scholarship on PBL examines the ways in which PBL is both conceived and implemented in clinical education. The work has a dual emphasis, research-driven on the one hand, while on the other assessing new methodologies to explore how problem-based curricula support the achievement of students’ learning outcomes in the context of clinical education. The chapters draw on studies that explore PBL both theoretically and empirically. The volume’s eclecticism capitalises on the growing body of empirical research into PBL evaluations. It balances this with studies analysing the relatively new area of discourse-based research on PBL-in-action, whose focus has been to interrogate the ‘how’ of student learning in curricula with PBL content.This publication will be of interest to clinical teachers, curriculum designers and those interested in innovations in the scholarship of teaching and learning in PBL curricula.

Current economic difficulties and the challenge of competing in the world market have necessitated a rethinking of American approaches to the utilization of people in organizations. Management now recognizes a need to have workers take on more responsibility at the points of production, of sale, and of service rendered if the United States is to compete in rapidly changing world markets. This development means that much more is expected of even entry-level members of the American workforce. Thus, even more is expected of our high schools and colleges to provide this type of workforce. The need of American management for workers with greater skills and who can take on greater responsibility has spawned many commissions, task forces, and studies. All of them have contributed to the vast evidence documenting the need for a more highly skilled workforce. These studies are summarized and synthesized in this book. However, what remains largely undone is the development of methods to assess the necessary skills that have been identified. A major portion of this book deals with assessment issues. Workforce Readiness: Competencies and Assessment explores the state-of-the-art in the specification of competencies (skills) and their assessment for students entering the world of work from both high school and college. Both individual and team competencies are examined via data that has been reported and collected in various settings--schools, laboratories, and industrial facilities.

This complete guide to problem-based learning (PBL) in medicine and health professions explains the aims and essential elements of PBL and provides keys for successfully working in small groups.

This book is among the first of its kind to comprehensively examine the implementation of soft skills in universities in the developing country, Vietnam. The context is unique as the implementation is taking place within the distinctive socio-economic, cultural and political characteristics of the country, amidst several simultaneously-executed educational reforms. Tran lays down the foundation for discussion by providing readers with a comprehensive review of how soft skills implementation has come into existence in higher education across the globe, before diving into the implementation of soft skills in Vietnamese universities. He goes on to highlight the interesting differences in the conceptualization of soft skills between Vietnamese universities and those in the West. The book depicts and compares how university leaders and managers tackle contextual factors, submit to constraints enforced by political forces, and how they use institutional advantages available for implementation. It goes further to examine how personal and contextual factors affect teachers’ and students’ engagement with the implementation, and highlights the role of work-integrated learning and extra-curricular activities in developing soft skills for students. Finally, the book investigates the contribution of external stakeholders, such as alumni, employers, skills experts, and local authorities, to the implementation and obstacles that prevent their participation. This book will be a valuable reference for the implementation of soft skills in higher education around the world.

Over many decades the global development of professional accounting education programmes has been undertaken by higher education institutions, professional accounting bodies, and employers. These institutions have sometimes co-operated and sometimes been in conflict over the education and/or training of future accounting professionals. These ongoing problems of linkage and closure between academic accounting education and professional training have new currency because of pressures from students and employers to move accounting preparation onto a more efficient, economic and practical basis. The Interface of Accounting Education and Professional Training explores current elements of the interface between the academic education and professional training of accountants in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the UK. It argues for a reassessment of the considerations and requirements for developing professional accounting programs which can make a student: capable of being an accountant (the academy); ready to be an accountant (the workplace); and professional in being an accountant (the professional bodies). This book was originally published as a special issue of Accounting Education: An International Journal.