The 21st Annual AMIC Conference

Putra Sarjana Program UPM

Provision of Student Feedback and Examiner Report Writing Seminar

Wednesday, 11th July 2012

Registration time : 8.30 am – 9.00 am

Lecture time : 9.00 am – 12.00 noon

Venue : DKFPP2, Faculty of Educational Studies, UPM

Speaker : Associate Professor Dr Shakila binti Abdul Manan (Universiti Sains Malaysia)

Description

Provision of Student Feedback

The provision of feedback to students is an essential part of the learning process, in that it helps students better focus upon their respective fields of study, and can revive the completion of their degrees. This seminar will help prospective of engaging with the subject matter in a non-dismissive fashion, articulacy in communication, and presenting constructive criticism that students can build upon.

Examiner Report Writing

One often overlooked aspect of an academician’s responsibilities is being a member of an examination committee. Writing an effective examiner’s report requires largely the same mechanism as providing direct feedback to a student; but given that there is greater distance between the examiner and student than from the supervisor, this seminar will show future academicians how to maintain the delicate balance between wanting to be of help the student and maintaining academic rigour.

Others program:

1.      Introduction to Teaching Seminar – July 5, 2012

2.      Seminar on Managing The Writing Process – July 13, 2012

3.      The PhD Examination Process – July 14, 2012

Not Making The Progress You Want?

Not Making The Progress You Want?

If you've been spinning your wheels or not making the kind of progress that you want to make, here are your next three steps:

1. Your first step is to set a reasonable goal for the next week of progress. It might be 15 minutes a day. It might be 30 minutes a day; whatever the amount of time or the output that you create-two pages of writing or one page of writing-it needs to be something that you easily can do. You hear that or read that goal and you say--Oh, no sweat, that's totally not a problem.

2. The second step is that you need to set up a reward system for yourself when you actually have completed those actions or behaviors that you defined in step one.

3. The third thing is you need to just actually take the action. You go through then the cycle of behavior and reward, behavior and reward. Just commit to doing that for seven days. You can do anything for seven days, but commit to doing that for seven days, and then evaluate how much further along you've gotten compared to last week.

If you find that you've gotten further, and just as importantly, the process has felt better, keep doing more of the same.

If you find that this hasn't exactly worked for you (which I don't really expect), but let's just say that the 1% of people that this may not work for you, than your task is to figure out what parts of it can be adjusted or tweaked until you find a better working style.

Focus on ways to keep yourself working at a constant and steady pace. Remember, in the dissertation-like in life, slow and steady often wins the race.

Until Next Time...

My PhD Research: About Melaka

The Dangers of Overestimation

Dear Muhamad,

I read an article recently that says that people tend to seriously overestimate what they can accomplish in one year.

A tendency to overestimate in the short term is one reason for a lot of dissertation frustration and failure. Imagine how frustrating it would be if you were trying to train your pet in a new behavior, and you initially set the criteria that your pet, (let's say it's a dog) your dog would need to sit up and beg, and you would reward it with a treat.

Let's say that your dog sits up and begs, and you give it a treat. Your dog does it again, but then you decide that you should change the behavior, and so you don't give your dog a treat. Then, the third day your dog does it again, and you don't give your dog a treat, and so on, and so on.

What ends up happening is very quickly the dog will extinguish his learned behavior. Without a proper schedule of reinforcement and reward, certain behaviors will die off.

How this relates to your dissertation process is this: Most of the time you don't give yourself adequate rewards and reinforcements for continuing your behavior. Let's say that you decide you're going to sit down and work for a half an hour today, which by the way, is a very good amount of time to work.

So you're going to work for 30 minutes today. You sit down, and you accomplish that, and you may give yourself a reward, and that feels great. Then somewhere between today and tomorrow you're going to think about your progress, and if you're like most of the people that I've worked with or that I know, you're going to start criticizing that. You're going to start saying-Well 30 minutes is really nothing, I probably could do an hour tomorrow.

Then what is going to happen is you are going to sit down and you are going to do kind eke out maybe an hour; or maybe you wont, maybe after between 30 and 45 minutes, you'll find yourself not really making any progress, and you'll eventually just give it up for the day.

But you will leave that saying-Well I didn't reach my goal, so I'm not going to give myself a reward.

Then you'll say--Well, if I didn't really quite meet an hour, the intelligent thing, or the emotionally relevant thing, would be to say-Well I didn't quite meet an hour, let me backup and see if I could do another 30 minutes or another 45 minutes.

What most of you will do, is you will end up saying--Well ok, what I should do then is probably just put in a two-hour block or four-hour block. Again, you will go into the work, you may or may not reach that goal, and you're not going to give yourself reward.

Then pretty soon, like teaching your dog a new trick, the behavior is going to be extinguished because you haven't reinforced it.

A better situation, or a better way to approach it, is to give yourself the time to meet reasonable and doable goals. So you would work for 30 minutes, and then reward yourself. The next day work for another 30, and reward yourself. The third day, 30- reward; the fourth day, 30-reward, etc., etc.

Now in a week of doing this, five days of doing this, you'll have put in at least 2 1/2 solid hours on your dissertation, which for some of you will be more than you've been over the past month or month and a half.

The idea is that you need to be consistent, and you need to set doable and reasonable goals along the way because you don't want to be caught in the trap of overestimating what you can do and then extinguishing any positive behaviors before they have a chance to actually become part of your repertoire.

Until Next Time,

-Dr. Rachna-