Identifying home advantage in international tennis and golf tournaments

A regression analysis of competitors' tournament results in relation to their world rankings was proposed to identify the effect of home advantage in international ‘grand-slam’ tennis and ‘major’ golf tournaments. The results provided little evidence of home advantage in either the grand-slam tennis or the golf tournaments held in 1993. The only possible evidence of home advantage was found in the Wimbledon tennis and the US Open golf championships. Even these findings can be explained, at least partially, by (1) the availability of information concerning the low world rankings of the British tennis players competing at Wimbledon, and (2) selective entry, allowing only the world's top-ranked foreign golfers into the US open golf tournament. In both cases, the lower ranking home competitors have a greater opportunity to perform above their anticipated world rankings. Therefore, provided entry into tennis and golf tournaments is truly ‘open’ to both the host nation's representatives and foreign competitors alike, home advantage does not appear to be a major factor influencing the competitors' performance in such competitions. These findings may be explained by the relatively objective nature of the scoring systems used in tennis and golf, unlike the subjective influence of refereeing decisions on the results of team-games such as soccer.     

Gender Imbalance in Referrals to an Educational Psychology Service

Referrals to an educational psychology service (EPS) were recorded in terms of school phase, gender and presenting problem. Examination of the data revealed a male:female referral ratio of more than 3:1. In all school phases, more boys than girls were referred, with the preponderance of boys being greatest in the primary sector. Overall, between six and nine times more boys than girls were presenting behavioural problems. Practical implications are discussed and it is suggested that such monitoring is an important starting point in working towards equality of access to educational psychology services.     

Distance Education at the Crossroads

A number of issues in contemporary distance education are reviewed from the perspectives of distance education as practice and as a field of study. In the practice of distance education, government agendas are supplanted by institutional agendas, the clientele shifts from undergraduate second‐chance learners to fee‐paying postgraduates, and the models and methods are under challenge by the online revolution. As a soft–applied field of study, distance education research is susceptible to externally set agendas and prone to external criticism. Distance educators need to address these externally defined issues in terms that speak to its critics.     

Student feedback to improved retention: using a mixed-methods approach to extend specific feedback to a generalisable concept

ABSTRACT

Across the Higher Education (HE) sector student feedback is used to feed into university processes and guide decision making. In this study, data gathered allowed the authors to investigate a hitherto neglected, but important, cohort of successful students – those who succeeded when all the odds were stacked against them. The identified group of students had relatively low predictive probabilities of passing their module, and yet despite all the odds passed. These identified students were interviewed by phone which yielded a much richer data set than is often available from student surveys. The advice they considered to be important to future students included specific guidance to get ahead, to plan and to contact their own academic tutor. Based on this advice an opportunity for future students to have a flexible early start on a specific module was created. A 4% increase in the number of registered students who subsequently started the module was maintained through to module completion.