Determinants of timely completion: the impact of Bachelor's degree programme characteristics and student motivation on study progress

Timely completion of university degree programmes is a topic of growing concern to higher education institutions and their students. This paper reports on a study about the impact of degree programme characteristics and student motivation on study progress. The setting for the study is a Dutch law school. Data on degree programme characteristics, student ability, motivation, academic performance and academic pressure were collected from 168 first-year students six months after the start of their studies. Analysis of the effects of degree programme characteristics and students' initial motivation on study progress shows that study progress mainly depends on ability, timely completion goals and transparency of assessments. The study also shows that transparency of assessment procedures considerably lowers fear of failure and academic pressure.     

Recollections of sexual socialisation among marginalised heterosexual black men

This paper describes the sexual socialisation process of marginalised, drug-using heterosexual black men, focusing primarily on the sources and content of sexual information. Analysing qualitative interview data, we discovered that the men in our sample both learn about sex and become sexually active at an early age. They most often learn about sex from the media and least often learn about sex from family members. The content of sexual information varies in specifics, but overall tends to equate sex with pleasure, encourage sexual activity with multiple partners and emphasise using protection. Our goal is to use this data to better understand how sexual socialisation contributes to the prevalence of multiple sexual partners and high rates of HIV among heterosexual black men in order to inform future risk-reduction intervention programmes.     

Measurement invariance and validity of a brief questionnaire on reading motivation in elementary students

In order to initiate more research on the role of reading motivation during the initial stages of learning to comprehend texts, we developed the Reading Motivation Questionnaire for Elementary Students (RMQ‐E). The sample comprised 1497 elementary students in Grades 1–3. By means of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, three factors were determined: Curiosity, involvement and competition. The three‐factor structure of the RMQ‐E was found to be invariant across grade levels (scalar invariance) and across female and male students (strict invariance). As was anticipated, students in higher grades and male students were lower in curiosity and involvement than students in lower grades and female students. Whereas competitive reading motivation did not differ across grade levels, it was higher for boys than for girls. Moreover, the contributions of involvement and competition to reading amount and reading competence were in accordance with the hypotheses. The predictive validity of curiosity, however, was not confirmed.     

Expanding young children’s lifeworld

Cultural Studies of Science Education - The link between science education and early childhood education is still blurred. This is so because many science education researchers apparently, but...     

Authentic science experiences as a vehicle to change students’ orientations toward science and scientific career choices: Learning from the path followed by Brad

Bringing a greater number of students into science is one of, if not the most fundamental goals of science education for all, especially for heretofore-neglected groups of society such as women and Aboriginal students. Providing students with opportunities to experience how science really is enacted—i.e., authentic science—has been advocated as an important means to allow students to know and learn about science. The purpose of this paper is to problematize how “authentic” science experiences may mediate students’ orientations towards science and scientific career choices. Based on a larger ethnographic study, we present the case of an Aboriginal student who engaged in a scientific internship program. We draw on cultural–historical activity theory to understand the intersection between science as practice and the mundane practices in which students participate as part of their daily lives. Following Brad, we articulate our understanding of the ways in which he hybridized the various mundane and scientific practices that intersected in and through his participation and by which he realized his cultural identity as an Aboriginal. Mediated by this hybridization, we observe changes in his orientation towards science and his career choices. We use this case study to revisit methodological implications for understanding the role of “authentic science experiences” in science education.

Changes in the Most-Cited Scholars and Works Over 25 Years: The Evolution of the Field of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Cohn and Farrington’s work in citation analysis has examined scholarly influence within criminological research for over 25 years. The current analysis tracks the ten most-cited scholars and each scholar’s most-cited works in four international criminology journals and six American criminology and criminal justice journals over twenty-five years and five time periods—1986–1990, 1991–1995, 1996–2000, 2001–2005, and 2006–2010. This approach extends the traditional approach to citation analysis by documenting increases and decreases in individual citation careers as well as in the most-cited scholarly contributions of the most-cited scholars during a period of significant growth in criminology. The most-cited works mostly fall within the areas of developmental and life-course criminology and criminal careers, reflecting the importance of these topics in criminology.     

In support of a functional definition of interaction

Abstract

A common theme in the distance education literature is that delivery technologies with the potential for real‐time interactivity will improve both the image and practice of distance education. Although there appears to be a growing acceptance of a causal relationship between system interactivity and instructional interaction, neither concept has been clearly or functionally defined. This article discusses several systems models and relates them to the contexts of instructional delivery, instructional design, instructional theory, and learning theory in an attempt to establish conceptual parameters for the function of interaction.