The development of a rubric for peer assessment of individual teamwork skills in undergraduate midwifery students

BackgroundPoor teamwork is cited as one of the major root causes of adverse events in healthcare. Bullying, resulting in illness for staff, is an expression of poor teamwork skills. Despite this knowledge, poor teamwork persists in healthcare and teamwork skills are rarely the focus of teaching and assessment in undergraduate health courses.AimTo develop and implement an assessment tool for use in facilitating midwifery students’ learning of teamwork skills.MethodsThis paper describes how the TeamUP rubric tool was developed. A review of the literature found no research reports on how to teach and assess health students’ teamwork skills in standing teams. The literature, however, gives guidance about how university educators should evaluate individual students using peer assessment. The developmental processes of the rubric were grounded in the theoretical literature and feminist collaborative conversations. The rubric incorporates five domains of teamwork skills: Fostering a Team Climate; Project Planning; Facilitating Teams; Managing Conflict and Quality Individual Contribution. The process and outcomes of student and academic content validation are described.ConclusionThe TeamUP rubric is useful for articulating, teaching and assessing teamwork skills for health professional students. The TeamUP rubric is a robust, theoretically grounded model that defines and details effective teamwork skills and related behaviours. If these skills are mastered, we predict that graduates will be more effective in teams. Our assumption is that graduates, empowered by having these skills, are more likely to manage conflict effectively and less likely to engage in bullying behaviours.     

Family Configurations and Child-Care Patterns: Familes with Two or More Preschool-Age Children

Objectives . This article examines the extent to which mothers must find child-care arrangements for more than one preschool child and, when they do, the strategies they adopt to juggle their work and family roles. Methods . We use national data from numerous studies with information on fertility and child care among employed mothers with children. Results . We find that it is a common life-course experience for mothers to need child care for two or more preschool-age children. Employed mothers' preferred strategy for child care for their multiple preschool-age children is to place all preschoolers in the same type of arrangement, choosing parental care more often and center care less often than employed mothers with one preschooler. Conclusions . Previous child-care research has ignored the complexities parents face when they must make child-care decisions about all their preschool-age children simultaneously. Child-care decisions need to be studied within the family and household context.     

Children's Moral Reasoning Regarding Physical and Relational Aggression

Elementary school children's moral reasoning concerning physical and relational aggression was explored. Fourth and fifth graders rated physical aggression as more wrong and harmful than relational aggression but tended to adopt a moral orientation about both forms of aggression. Gender differences in moral judgments of aggression were observed, with girls rating physical and relational aggression as more wrong and relational aggression as more harmful than boys. In addition, girls were more likely to adopt a moral orientation when judging physical and relational aggression and girls more often judged relational aggression than physical aggression from the moral domain. Finally, moral reasoning about aggression was associated with physically and relationally aggressive behavior. Considered together, the results indicate that children tend to adopt a moral orientation about aggression, but that they nonetheless differentiate between physical and relational aggression in their moral judgments.     

Developing Evidence-Based Interventions for Foster Children: An Example of a Randomized Clinical Trial with Infants and Toddlers

Children who enter foster care have usually experienced maltreatment as well as disruptions in relationships with primary caregivers. These children are at risk for a host of problematic outcomes. However, there are few evidence-based interventions that target foster children. This article presents preliminary data testing the effectiveness of an intervention, Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up, to target relationship formation in young children in the foster care system. Children were randomly assigned to the experimental intervention that was designed to enhance regulatory capabilities or to a control intervention. In both conditions, the foster parents received in-home training for 10 weekly sessions. Post-intervention measures were collected 1 month following the completion of the training. Outcome measures included children's diurnal production of cortisol (a stress hormone), and parent report of children's problem behaviors. Children in the experimental intervention group had lower cortisol values than children in the control intervention. Also, the experimental intervention parents reported fewer behavior problems for older versus younger foster children. Results provide preliminary evidence of the effectiveness of an intervention that targets children's regulatory capabilities and serve as an example of how interventions can effectively target foster children in the child welfare system.     

Understanding Bullying in an Affluent,Academically Rigorous U.S. High School: A Grounded Theory Analysis

Students and staff members from a U.S. high school were asked to discuss their understanding of bullying within the context of their school social environment. Findings from the grounded theory analysis suggest that understandings of bullying are socially constructed and that how bullying is understood is influenced by context and by the negotiation of identity within that context. Furthermore, subjects focused on drama, a form of social interaction considered far more common than bullying. Findings suggest that research on bullying may benefit from shifting its emphasis on defining bullying and establishing prevalence, to exploring youths' contextual and developmental perspectives.     

Launching the workplace flexibility movement: work family research and a program of social change

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Workplace, Work Force & Working Families program was established in 1994 and ended in 2011. Over the course of its 17-year lifespan, this program – through its vision, commitment and unique, pragmatic grant-making strategies – pioneered the interdisciplinary field of work–family research and spearheaded a national movement to create more flexible workplaces that effectively meet the needs of employees and employers. The program's first strategic phase supported high-quality, multidisciplinary research to examine what was happening within working families at all stages of their lives, both at home and at work. Results from these investigations highlighted the structural mismatch between the needs of this diverse workforce – comprised increasingly of working parents and older workers – and the demands of a rigidly structured workplace requiring full-time, full-year work, with little to no flexibility in how, when, or where work gets done. After a decade of scholarly research documenting that the challenges facing American families were not private, individual problems but public, societal concerns, the Sloan Foundation designed and launched in 2003 the National Workplace Flexibility Initiative. Its goals were twofold: to make workplace flexibility a compelling national issue and to establish it as a standard of the American workplace. As a result of the collective efforts of Sloan-supported organizations and people, the stage is now set for a social movement to realign the structure of the American workplace to the needs of the twenty-first century workforce. Lessons for subsequent research-driven social movements close the article.     

Transparent and Mysterious: On Collecting,the Photograph and Tomio Seike

In this article, the author puts theories about aesthetics, vision and looking into practice when considering Tomio Seike’s Untitled #3 (1995). The photograph’s subject (a bare arm, languidly stretched over a piece of furniture) draws the viewer to an initial assumption: that the photograph is of a nude woman. However, other visual clues in the photograph complicate that assumption, and help explain why, as a collector, the author was drawn to it and remains captivated by the image. Untitled #3 is part of an artistic conversation not only with other photographs in Seike’s oeuvre, but also with other artists (Japanese and non‐Japanese) who focus on the body. Seike’s work is both a part of the tradition which produced masters such as Imogen Cunningham in the West and Nobuyoshi Araki in the East, and a quiet rebellion against that same tradition. The intimate, lushly toned, contemplative work invites the viewer into a way of seeing influenced by the Japanese concept of matsuri, the balance between noise and stillness. By considering these seemingly disparate elements, the author untangles at least part of the mystery which makes up the meaning of Tomio Seike’s Untitled #3, and illustrates why, in the words of Susan Sontag, photographic messages are both “transparent and mysterious”.

If photographs are messages, the message is both transparent and mysterious. (Sontag 1999 Sontag, S. 1999. On Photography, New York: Anchor Books.  [Google Scholar], p. 111)