Exploring relatedness to field of study as an indicator of student retention

Currently, tertiary education student retention is an important concern for universities. Prior research suggests that course completion depends on a number of factors, many of which are recalcitrant to intervention. This paper explores one factor: student relatedness to their chosen course and profession, as evidenced within two education courses. The analysis of survey and focus group data from first year, semester one students has found that the respondents relate to their course and their profession more idealistically than pragmatically. We suggest that relative unawareness of the realities of teaching might retain students in the early years, only to cause attrition when harsher realities of classrooms set in during the later years of their course. Two possible interventions are considered: post‐structurally‐derived critical reflection and peer mentoring in the hope that they will facilitate a blend of idealism and pragmatism that will sustain students to course completion and entry into their profession.     

The truths of business and the lies of academia: the order of discourse on higher education in Poland

ABSTRACT

This article presents the results of an analysis of hierarchization strategies in public debate over unemployment among university graduates. The aim of the investigation was to grasp the way that discourse controls interact with one another to produce and reinforce a particular ‘truth’ about the university. The objects of our analysis were the ways of identifying the following places by the media actors: (a) the privileged positions from which the truth of a given social order is told and within which the common good may be expressed, and (b) the positions which are opposed to the latter and from which only a particular interest and ‘populist’ demands can be articulated. These two categories in the debate were successively filled by the following groups: entrepreneurs (bearing witness to the truth about the low level of instruction at universities) and the representatives of the social sciences and humanities defending themselves against these accusations. The diversity of argumentative strategies was revealed at the three levels of the order of discourse: hierarchization of responsibility, hierarchization of access to the truth, and hierarchization of interests.     

Young Children’s Representations of Spatial and Functional Relations Between Objects

Three experiments investigated changes from 15 to 30 months of age in children’s (N = 114) mastery of relations between an object and an aperture, supporting surface, or form. When choosing between objects to insert into an aperture, older children selected objects of an appropriate size and shape, but younger children showed little selectivity. Further experiments probed the sources of younger children’s difficulty by comparing children’s performance placing a target object in a hole, on a 2‐dimensional form, or atop another solid object. Together, the findings suggest that some factors limiting adults’ object representations, including the difficulty of comparing the shapes of positive and negative spaces and of representing shapes in 3 dimensions, contribute to young children’s errors in manipulating objects.     

Using a Satisfaction Index to Compare Students’ Satisfaction During and After Higher Education Service Consumption

Tertiary Education and Management - This study explores the factors that influence students’ satisfaction with higher education services and assess how they change after graduation, when...     

Mapping control and affiliation in teacher–student interaction with State Space Grids

This paper explores how State Space Grids (SSG), a dynamic systems research method, can be used to map teacher–student interactions from moment-to-moment and thereby to incorporate temporal aspects of interaction. Interactions in two secondary school classrooms are described in terms of level of interpersonal control and affiliation, and of variability and recurrent stable states (called “attractors”) of teacher–student interaction. Undesirable interactions appeared to feature weaker attractors and higher variability than more desirable interactions. SSGs appeared a promising way to study temporal aspects of classroom interaction, offering variability and attractors as indicators for the quality of classroom interaction.     

Cross-cultural Study of Understanding of Scale and Measurement: Does the everyday use of US customary units disadvantage US students?

Quantitative and qualitative studies of various aspects of the perception of biotechnology were conducted among 469 Slovenian high school students of average age 17 years. Our research aimed to explore relationships among students' pre-knowledge of molecular and human genetics, and their attitudes to four specific biotechnological applications. These applications—Bt corn, genetically modified (GM) salmon, somatic and germ line gene therapy (GT)—were investigated from the viewpoints of usefulness, moral acceptance and risk perception. In addition, patterns and quality of moral reasoning related to the biotechnological applications from the aspect of moral acceptability were examined. Clear gender differences were found regarding the relationship between our students' pre-knowledge of genetics and their attitudes to biotechnological applications. While females with a better genetics background expressed a higher risk perception in the case of GM salmon, their similarly well-educated male colleagues emphasized the risk associated with the use of germ line GT. With all four biotechnological applications, patterns of both rationalistic—deontological and teleological—and intuitive moral reasoning were identified. Students with poorer genetics pre-knowledge applied an intuitive pattern of moral reasoning more frequently than their peers with better pre-knowledge. A pattern of emotive reasoning was detected only in the case of GM salmon. A relatively low quality of students' moral reasoning, as demonstrated by their brief and small number of supporting justifications (explanations), show that there is a strong need for practising skills of argumentation about socio-scientific issues in Slovenian high schools on a much larger scale. The implications for future research and classroom applications are discussed.     

A Relationship Approach to Higher Education Institution Stakeholder Management

Tertiary Education and Management - The functions of teaching and research in higher education institutions (HEIs) are being reassessed, with particular emphasis on the contribution they make to...