Abstracts - Earli

which higher education is experiencing in the early 21st century through its interface with digitaltechnologies. It is against, and through, such shifts that transformation in student understanding isnow frequently positioned. Such developments place increasing emphasis on collaborative modesof enquiry, the importance of self-regulation and self-explanation, process as against artefact,consensus as against authority, and exploration as against argument. The transformed conceptualunderstanding of students is also imbricated within streams and flows of information leading tofast and continual processes of revision, amendment, and truncation leading in some cases toalmost permanent states of rethinking and emergence and offering only provisional stabilities. Thepaper argues, from analysis of empirical data gathered from UK funded projects implementing thethresholds framework, that such reconsidered assessment practice offers important dimensions toidentify at which points, and in what ways, individual students might experience conceptualdifficulty and experience barriers to their understanding. Used as a set of analytical lenses weargue further that these modes of variation and revised assessment criteria present an insightfulconceptual basis for developing new and creative methods of assessment and can inform course(re)design in generative and sustainable fashion.Peer mentoring in higher education: a qualitative analysis of the epistemic basis to how mentorsteach and how mentees learnShaheeda Essack, Departmen of Education, South AfricaThe peer mentor programme was established as an attempt to address the high failure and attritionrate among first-year academically under-prepared students at the Westville campus of theUniversity of Kwa-Zulu Natal. Among the challenges facing students and the institution are issuesof alienation, socio-cultural diversity, academic under-preparedness and economic inequality. Theaim of mentoring was to ensure that high-risk students are equipped with the requisite knowledge,skills and attitude to survive in a highly competitive higher education environment, and beyond.This paper is located within Urie Bronfenbrenner’s (1993) ecology model of human developmentand reports on the how, why and what of student development as against the person-processdimensionand the role of peer mentoring in intricately linking disciplinary and personalepistemologies vis-à-vis the four developmentally instigative characteristics:inviting behaviourversus inhibiting behaviour, selective responsitivity, structuring proclivities and directive beliefs.The evaluation of the impact of peer mentoring was conducted through the dissemination ofquestionnaires to mentees and focus group interviews held with mentors. This paper focuses on thequalitative feedback received from mentors/mentees,which was analysed in terms ofcontent/thematic analysis and discourse analysis. Whereas Megginson & Clutterbuck (1997: 13)define mentoring as leading to massive shifts in knowledge skills and attitude, the results indicatethat such quantitative shifts are accompanied by qualitative shifts as well. The actual teaching andlearning that transpires on the ground between two or more peers results in altered andtransformed ways of perceiving and engaging with one’s environment in a manner that createsbalance and reconciliation. Of necessity to the why, what and how students learn is the need totake into account disciplinary and personal epistemologies.Algorithmic understanding and threshold functions: exploring students’ conceptual understandingof calculusMax Scheja, Stockholm University, Department of Education, SwedenKerstin Pettersson, University of Skovde, School of Life Sciences, SwedenThe study explores the nature of students’ conceptual understanding in relation to ‘thresholdconcepts’ in mathematics. Twenty students of engineering were asked first to rate their own– 756 –