Developing Your Own Simulation for Teaching Social Studies

Many students experience a personally significant loss of some nature during the school year. While some losses may appear trivial to adults, other losses are life-changing, such as the death of a loved one, and, compounded by normative developmental changes and transitions, may negatively impact students’ emotional well-being, behavior, and academic progress. In this article, the author discusses the issue of loss for children and adolescents and reviews possible approaches educators may use to provide support to loss-affected students.     

Counseling and advisory service for adult learners: An Open University perspective

The nature of counselling and advisory services which the Open University offers its students and applicants is dictated by the fact that its students are learning at a distance, are adults, and are not engaged in full-time study. In addition, a policy of open entry means that while some students come from a background of higher education, others have few or no previous qualifications. These factors require the University to try to provide an individual service to its applicants and students whenever possible. In pursuit of this aim students are allocated to Tutor-Counsellors, part-time staff who are locally based and who have a continuing responsibility for the progress of individual students from their initial registration until graduation. These Tutor-Counsellors play a considerable part in determining the extent, nature, and timing of the resources with which the university can support an individual student. Tuition for higher level specialist courses is normally provided by tutors at a greater distance, with the Tutor-Counsellors continuing to provide local generalist support. The Open University has set up a regional infra-structure of full-time academic and administrative staff for the support, briefing, supervision, and organization of this local network of part-time staff.     

The sensitivity of the pigeon’s keypeck to the differential reinforcement of long interresponse times

Keypecking of pigeons was studied under differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate (DRL) and variable-interval (VI) schedules in which the interreinforcement times on the two schedules were equated by a yoking procedure. Each schedule was available for half of every session and a change of schedule was signaled by a change of key color. The value of the DRL schedule was varied from .5 to 300 sec. Response rates were always higher in the VI schedule, but within sessions there was a sharp change in response rate coincident with the change in schedule only under lower schedule values. A group without prior training was tested with a 180-sec schedule value, and it, too, developed a higher response rate during the VI schedule, showing that the effect was not dependent on prior experience under low schedule values. In all conditions except the .5- and 1-sec values of the schedule, the mean proportion of responses emitted during the VI schedule was approximately .85 of the responses emitted during both schedules. The conclusion was that the requirement of a minimum interresponse time for reinforcement may work its effect by determining which responses may occur just prior to the reinforced response and thus receive delayed reinforcement.     

Instruments for obtaining student feedback: a review of the literature

This paper reviews the research evidence concerning the use of formal instruments to measure students’ evaluations of their teachers, students’ satisfaction with their programmes and students’ perceptions of the quality of their programmes. These questionnaires can provide important evidence for assessing the quality of teaching, for supporting attempts to improve the quality of teaching and for informing prospective students about the quality of course units and programmes. The paper concludes by discussing several issues affecting the practical utility of the instruments that can be used to obtain student feedback. Many students and teachers believe that student feedback is useful and informative, but for a number of reasons many teachers and institutions do not take student feedback sufficiently seriously.