Connecting with Other Junior Researchers - JURE

This week I have enjoyed the fantastic opportunity to participate in the JURE conference for Junior Researchers of EARLI (European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction) in Tampere, Finland! It was a great experience to meet, network with, and learn from PhD colleagues in education from all across the world whilst also being the only student at the conference representing the University of Edinburgh.

JURE provided a great programme of academic and social activities to help early career researchers get to know each other and exchange ideas. On Saturday, I enjoyed taking part in the JURE walking tour of Tampere, starting at the City Hall, progressing through the historic market, and passing local Schools. It was really interesting to hear about the Finnish outdoor nurseries where children stay outdoors all day long, as well as the early language-learning at primary schools. The tour then headed up the nearby hill through a beautiful forest to the highest part of the city where you can see views over the two lakes (on either side of the city) and also enjoy the quaint café which is known for the best doughnuts in the city. They were indeed delicious! We finished the day at a local restaurant later in the evening where it was great to meet others who had been arriving throughout the day ahead of the conference.

After many months of preparations for JURE from submitting my abstract last autumn, my article last winter, and my peer review last spring, it was fantastic to present my paper during a higher education strand of sessions. I introduced models of student/staff partnerships and my emerging model of the variables of co-creation of the curriculum, as well as my initial findings of staff and students’ perceptions of the benefits of participating in co-creation of the curriculum projects at Scottish universities. The paper was well received, with interesting questions to delve more into the nature of the co-creation projects, selection of student participants, how ‘success’ was measured, the nature of student/staff dialogue, and any correlations with student achievement. Presenting also led to great conversations with a PhD student from Spain who researches co-creation of grading rubrics in universities and with a student from Canada who wants to start similar research on co-creation of the curriculum.

Throughout the conference, I really enjoyed participating in a variety of sessions. The roundtable discussions were a particularly interesting format, with PhD students presenting only a five-minute overview of their project plans and leading a discussion to receive feedback from others and brainstorm solutions to any issues they were wrestling with. I really liked this more interactive format that promoted collaboration amongst early career researchers. I feel that other conferences and also University departments could benefit from offering such sessions to promote more discussion and shared problem-solving amongst new researchers to help them with planning their research design or wrestling with difficult questions during the analysis.

The other presentations which most interested me focused on student motivation, agency, critical thinking skills, and academic achievement. A particularly interesting presentation was testing various flipped classroom models to promote students’ systematic creativity, inventive thinking, and satisfaction with a Finnish engineering course. The researcher found that the transition to blended learning can be difficult for both students and staff members, since the increased or different workload model can negatively affect attitudes and participation. Another very interesting presentation was on different online learning designs and how they affect different levels of student engagement, satisfaction, and pass rates; unfortunately, there were no conclusive results from the analysis of the fifty-five different learning designs. It seemed that the majority of participants were conducting quantitative, positivist studies into the psychology of education, and I was surprised how few other participants used qualitative methods or other research methodologies. Since the UK model of PhD study focuses on conducting research and writing one, cumulative thesis, I was also surprised that the majority of other participants (mostly PhD students from continental European or Scandinavian countries) were participating in a PhD by publication model.

Learning how much other PhD colleagues were publishing, I was especially motivated to participate in the Writing for International Scholarly Journals workshop at the conference which was led by an editor in chief and a representative from a large publisher. It was extremely beneficial that they provided so many tangible tips for writing strong journal articles that will be accepted into good journals, and they were also extremely accessible by answering many questions about the process. I also participated in an introduction to meta-analysis workshop on how to conduct statistical analysis of a large collection of results from individual studies – I was not familiar with this and it was a good opportunity to push myself to learn about this new area at JURE whilst there was the opportunity.

I was thrilled to participate in the JURE conference, meet other junior researchers from around the world, present my research, and learn more about the Finnish culture and education system which is world-renounced. It was beneficial to learn from the various presentations, workshops, and discussions over the past few days to help me reflect more on my PhD student journey, and it was wonderful to be supported by the Principal’s Go Abroad Fund from the University of Edinburgh to support me in this great opportunity. It was an educational trip but also fun to explore Tampere and Helsinki, as well as the Finnish food!