Disabled and successful: education in the life stories of disabled high achievers

There has been much debate concerning the pros and cons of special and mainstream education for young people with a disability. This paper adds data to this debate by reporting the educational experiences of 20 high-achievers with congenital disabilities who live in the United Kingdom and were born between 1950 and 1970. It presents personal accounts of the high-achievers' perceptions of how their education, which was either purely in special schools, in mainstream schools or a combination of both, had influenced their transition to adulthood. While those who attended special school considered it to provide a supportive environment that permitted the cultivation of their personalities without the constraints of non-disabled barriers, many others thought it prevented them as disabled children from interacting with non-disabled peers, thus inhibiting social integration between the disabled and non-disabled world. This was the main perceived advantage of mainstream education although problems of physical access meant that some choices were out of reach. The findings highlight how both special and mainstream education can be compatible with career success of individual disabled people. The paper implies that a combination of the two systems may be needed to facilitate disabled students to develop psychologically, socially and cognitively at the rate of their non-disabled peers, and proposes that link schools and partial integration could contribute to the achievement of such goals.     

Do examinations influence student evaluations?

This paper measures the impact of timing on student evaluations of teaching effectiveness, using a dataset of close to 3000 observations from Erasmus School of Economics. A special feature of the data is that students were able to complete on-line questionnaires during a time window ranging from one week before to one week after the final examination. This allows for the isolation of the effect of the examination on student evaluations. Among students who subsequently pass the exam, we find little difference between pre- and post-exam ratings. Among students who fail, evaluation scores are significantly lower after the exam on a number of items. Our evidence is compatible with a self-serving bias in student evaluations, but does not indicate that students seek revenge on instructors through lower ratings.     

Rabbit nictitating membrane conditioning: Lower limit of the effective interstimulus interval

In three experiments, the nictitating membrane response of rabbits was conditioned for 10 daily sessions at interstimulus intervals (ISIs) ranging from 48 to 125 msec, followed by a shift to 250 msec for 5 days. At tested ISIs shorter than 67 msec, there was no evidence of conditioning, and postshift performance revealed neither facilitation nor interference as a result of the first 10 conditioning sessions. Postshift performance of groups conditioned at preshift ISIs of 67 msec or longer revealed a gradient of increasing savings with increasing ISI. One of the groups in Experiment 1, initially conditioned at 250 msec ISI and then shifted to 48 msec, exhibited extinction of the previously well-conditioned response. Analysis of CR-onset latencies substantiated the absence of associative effects at very short ISIs. It was concluded that there is a temporal limit below which classical conditioning of the nictitating membrane response of rabbits employing forward CS-US pairing does not occur.     

Legitimacy,stratification, and internationalization in global higher education: the case of the International Association of Universities

Tertiary Education and Management - The International Association of Universities (IAU) is the only inclusive global university association, its membership barriers are low, yet few universities...