Sampling

Spent most of today on administrative tidying: getting samples of work ready to be seen by the external examiners for the various programmes I am 'module leader' on:

• BSc Hons Health & Lifestyle Management: Second year and third year psych modules
• BSc Hons Psychology: a third year module on applied health psychology 
• MSc Health Psychology: a module on long term conditions 

External examiners are senior academics from outside institutions who look at a sample of our students' work - in the context of a lot of other information - and check our academic standards.

For every module this requires the designated leader to put together a pack of information which typically includes:

• Copy of the module guide and all guidance given to student on the assessment they're required to do
• Copy of an overall marks list showing individual students' marks for each component (piece of coursework, exam, etc.), plus summary statistics for the whole group.
• Copies of marked coursework with evidence that marks have been internally moderated (checked) by another academic
• Copies of exam papers - with markers' guidelines
• Copies of marked exam scripts with evidence that marks have been internally moderated (checked) by another academic

Some external examiners also request summary statistics broken down per exam question (to see if some questions seemed 'harder' than others).

We also have to produce a form that shows an assessment 'audit trail' - evidence that we got all our assessment tasks and instructions checked and signed off by another academic within the department - before we used them. This process does happen but keeping a record can sometimes be forgotten...

All of the documentation required is kept on file until near the examination boards  - which are in the next couple of weeks - but it's still rather time consuming to collate it together into a digestible form. Not the most interesting of tasks but it still gives a sense of closure on the filing front.

Meanwhile of course teaching and assessment continues apace on postgraduate courses and preparations have to be made for students who'll be doing resits over the summer period.

PhD opportunities for research in psychology

I haven't had a funded PhD student of my own since I've been at Coventry and am hoping that various changes to the Faculty structure and research groups/centres will mean that I can now compete for funds to support this. I have good experience of supervision but have tended to inherit other people's students rather than taking on people whose research interests coincide directly with my own. 


The advert for PhD studentships came out online today.  If anyone reading this is interested in doing a PhD in any of the following areas and would like me to supervise, please let me know as soon as possible:


Health, especially gender specific issues, e.g. women's reproductive health, men's health behaviours; long term/chronic conditions; experiences of healthcare, e.g. good and bad experiences and need to improve patient experience.


Coping with difficult situations, especially in emergency or disaster work, e.g. mundane day to day experiences of ambulance, fire and police crews, e.g. in-theatre and post deployment experiences of armed services personnel, including but not specifically focussed on responses to traumatic situations.


I'm guessing this will be very competitive so we can work together to help refine and develop your plans.
Please see the entrance requirements online at http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/researchnet/ResearchStudents/ResearchStudentships/Pages/StudentshipDetail.aspx?stuID=73


And contact me if you'd like to talk about it further.

Mostly marking -and a new department

A lot of marking in last 24 hours... 


Students on a final year module in health psychology took a multiple choice class test under exam conditions some weeks ago. This was administered online and gave them their marks and feedback right away - thus meeting our demanding new targets for providing timely student feedback - a key element in getting good student satisfaction scores and rising up the university league tables.


Unfortunately the marking key that had been provided had some errors in it. A couple of students noticed that they'd been marked as wrong for answers they were sure they'd gotten right. I have spent many hours in the interim checking all 100 questions and regrading all students' papers manually.  Rather than being a quick and easy way to objectively assess students this turned out to be very time consuming and difficult - urgh.  What didn't help was that every students' virtual test 'paper' had the questions numbered differently and presented in a randomised order. This technical wheeze is meant to make it less likely that students sitting at adjacent PCs might be tempted to copy each others' answers. It also made it a pain to identify the problem items when regrading them by hand.


Much simpler was my exam essay marking for M99PY Management of Chronic Illness and Disability. Only nine candidates, with two essays each. Very low tech (and arguably less objective), but much more pleasant to do.  All the scripts are anonymised and I now hand them over to a colleague who will sample some and second mark them to check that the grading standard is appropriate and consistent.


The tedium was relieved today by a brief launch lunch, to celebrate the creation of a new academic department. Our faculty has just been restructured. Psychology will now be joined by colleagues from Clinical Psych, Criminology and Forensic and Investigative Studies, to form a new department called Psychology and Behavioural Sciences. 




 

Disaster Management Days 2 and 3

Rather briefer report from remainder of conference...


Met a nice man from Mexico who had just arrived and was (like me) expecting to be able to walk to the venue.  We shared a taxi.  His talk was on Physical vulnerability of critical facilities in Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands


Other papers I found especially interesting included several reporting various indices and tools to assess and compare disaster preparedness, readiness and resilience, including these from the Argonne National Laboratory:


Assessing community and region emergency-services capabilities 
Community resilience: measuring a community’s ability to withstand

I was also fascinated by a couple of presentations on emergency services responses.  One of these highlighted a fairly simple problem that ought to be fairly straightforward to address.  Apparently emergency responders (n the US state of Alabama at least) often report that traffic congestion significantly affects their ability to reach people in need, and that they are rarely given traffic information when setting off to jobs. Yet emergency dispatchers report that they often give this information but feel it makes little difference to outcomes. A case for dispatchers/controllers to spend the occasional shift in the vehicle with responders? And/or to use existing traffic information systems?

A much more complicated issue is how to co-ordinate responses to exceptional events, such as  the July 2005 bombings on the London public transport system. One paper reported the use of mathematical modelling to optimise the use of resources when responding to mass casualties across multiple incident scenes.    A major issue with this work may be persuading key decision makers that mathematical models have something valuable to offer, and helping them to understand how and why the models may work.

Disaster Management Day 1

OK so a lot has been happening while I haven't been posting, but no time to relate that just at the moment.


I'm at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, attending the Disaster Management 2011 Conference organised jointly by UCF and Wessex Institute of Technology (UK).


We were welcomed to the event by Carlos Brebbia (WIT) and Alain Kassab (UCF) who each told us a lot about their respective organisations.  We then had a very interesting keynote talk by Naim Kapucu, from the Centre for Public and Non-Profit Management.  He described how his PhD research was on the emergency responses to the terrorist attacks on the USA in September 11th 2001. On completing this he thought he would move into more general policy issues but fate had different ideas. He relocated to Florida and in 2004 the central region was struck by four hurricanes in rapid succession. This inevitably drew him back into the field of emergency responses to large scale disasters. 


[Florida is so accustomed to extreme weather events that every lecture theatre on campus has its own copy of the disaster response plan. The reality of this was brought home to me as I noticed the janitor's office next to the ladies loo was marked as a hurricane emergency local resource centre].


Dr Kapucu's research has made use of social network analysis to explore the interrelationships between the various federal, state, local, public and private sector organisations that all have a role to play in disaster management. he showed us some fascinating visual representations of the these networks, which can be used to diagnose weaknesses or breakdowns that may place the public at risk.


Towards the end of the day it was my turn to present the paper I co-authored with folks at Coventry: The contribution of human psychology to disaster management: mitigation, advance preparedness, response and recovery.  Given this rather inclusive title, luckily in my presentation I only had to plot out a broad overview of the areas where work has been done, and highlight gaps where there is potential for further development. The talk went well (I think) and I had some interesting questions, including one from a US healthcare professional about the phenomenon of 'worried well' self-presenting to emergency departments in crises, and another on the ways in which online social networking may give us an insight into the behaviour of volunteers in a disaster. More great ideas for further research...
The paper is available (in full text, via open access) at http://library.witpress.com/pages/PaperInfo.asp?PaperID=22040


During the final session of the day we became aware of a thunderstorm and high winds which necessitated a swift retreat back to the conference hotel.  I'm very grateful to the team who looked after us, reassured us and got us indoors safely before the threatened 'dime-sized' hailstones arrived.