Adapted Verbal Feedback,Instructor Interaction and Student Emotions in the Landscape Architecture Studio

In light of concerns with architectural students’ emotional jeopardy during traditional desk and final‐jury critiques, the authors pursue alternative approaches intended to provide more supportive and mentoring verbal assessment in landscape architecture studios. In addition to traditional studio‐based critiques throughout a semester, we provide privately held, one‐on‐ one feedback at the semester's close that follows a mentor–trainee model of purposeful interface and a vision of where the student is going. This article reports 82 landscape architecture students’ experience of this adapted verbal feedback. The findings suggest an overwhelming positive student experience, and we conclude that these sessions help balance the emotional challenge of architectural study with nurturing support. Furthermore, the students’ positivity was not influenced by their experiences in the previous class. We therefore conclude that the adapted feedback sessions provide appropriate closure, even when (perhaps particularly when) a student has had a negative emotional experience during the class.     

Evaluating a formalised peer mentoring programme: student voice and impact audit

Over the past 10 years, mentoring of children and young people has become an increasingly important feature of social policy in the United Kingdom. This is evidenced in the rapid growth in the number of mentoring schemes operating in a range of educational settings. In 2006 the Mentoring and Befriending Foundation was contracted by the Department for Education and Skills to pilot nationally a formal and sustainable peer mentoring scheme in 180 secondary schools in England, generating 3600 matched pairs. The evaluators, appointed by the Department for Education and Skills, had the overarching aim of supporting the development of evidence‐based peer mentoring and enhancing the capacity of those involved to engage in evaluation practice. This article reports the methodology and main findings of the evaluation of the programme. It was evident that schools engaged positively and productively with the project and with this structured form of mentoring. Qualitative interview evidence, self‐report data from the ‘About Me’ scale, and the teacher and mentee and mentor ‘voice’ attested to benefits, but impact data (attendance, attainment, behaviour) did not provide corroborative evidence of a positive effect.     

The Teaching Practices Inventory: A New Tool for Characterizing College and University Teaching in Mathematics and Science

We have created an inventory to characterize the teaching practices used in science and mathematics courses. This inventory can aid instructors and departments in reflecting on their teaching. It has been tested with several hundred university instructors and courses from mathematics and four science disciplines. Most instructors complete the inventory in 10 min or less, and the results allow meaningful comparisons of the teaching used for the different courses and instructors within a department and across different departments. We also show how the inventory results can be used to gauge the extent of use of research-based teaching practices, and we illustrate this with the inventory results for five departments. These results show the high degree of discrimination provided by the inventory, as well as its effectiveness in tracking the increase in the use of research-based teaching practices.     

Family Needs, and Self-Efficacy During a Child's Social Support Transition to School

The needs of families of young children with handicaps were examined in relationship to the transition from an early intervention/preschool program to school placements. The results showed that needs became less pronounced during and after a transition compared to the time period during which transition planning occurred, and that the self-efficacy of the parents during and following transitions was positively influenced by social support and the interaction between transition time and social support. The implications of the findings for promoting effective transitions are discussed, especially the importance of identifying and responding to both child- and family-level needs if broad-based social influences are to be assured as a result of transition activities.