‘A galaxy of sporting events’: sport’s role and significance in the Festival of Britain, 1951

The 1951 Festival of Britain has long been seen as a key moment in the country’s post-war history – especially in terms of popularising modern architecture and contemporary interior design, as well as symbolising the transition from acute economic austerity to a long period of relative affluence. However, successive writers have largely or completely ignored sport’s role in the Festival project. This paper argues that, in fact, sporting fixtures played an important role in the national and local festivities which were staged between May and September 1951. Their range, diversity and popularity means that the Festival should begin to be seen as a more successful and less insular event than previous studies have suggested. On the other hand, the support that such fixtures received from various newspapers and via the airwaves – courtesy of the BBC – indicates that the Festival faced far less media (and, indeed, political) opposition than its organisers liked to suggest and most historians have hitherto accepted. By studying the Festival’s sports programme, therefore, it is possible to gain fresh insights into the project as a whole and reassess its overall performance.     

The prediction of academic and clinical performance in medical school

Prior studies have suggested the importance of distinguishing between performance in the earlier and later years of medical education. Factor analysis of grades by year and faculty ratings of clinical and general medical competence for 661 medical students identified two uncorrelated factors clearly reflecting this distinction. The clinical performance factor, accounting for 48% of the communality of the matrix, was more or less unpredictable from aptitude and premedical academic achievement indices; it was marginally predictable from scales on the Adjective Check List. The academic performance factor, accounting for 31% of the variance among criteria, was forecast with acceptable accuracy (cross-validated R=0.43) by equations based on the Medical College Admission Test and premedical grade point average. Future study should stress the clinical performance factor; this criterion appears to be more important than academic attainment, and it is also less accurately predicted by current measures.     

Notes on Contributors

Concepts adapted from structuration theory are employed to analyse how a disjunction has been created and sustained between the form taken by annual development plans for schools and a more flexible approach to planning that appears, from small‐scale research, to be effective at school level. The interest of LEAs and central government in a high degree of external control over school development is interpreted as contradictory to the interest at school level in maintaining a high degree of control over internal development. It is argued that action according to these contradictory interests has not led to conflict because completion of the plan has been kept largely separate from ongoing strategic planning at school level. The concepts employed in this analysis are defined, features of LEA development plans for schools are discussed, research evidence on development planning is summarized, and unintended consequences of development plans as a form of bureaucratic control are suggested.     

Rigour in moderation processes is more important than the choice of method

Processes for moderating assessments are much debated in higher education. The myriad approaches to the task vary in their demands on staff time and expertise, and also in how valid, reliable and fair to students they appear. Medical education, with its diverse range of assessments and assessors across clinical and academic domains presents additional challenges to moderation. The current review focuses on medical education, considering double-marking and benchmarking as two broad classes of moderation procedure, and argues that it is the process more than the type of procedure which is crucial for successful moderation. The advantages and disadvantages of each class of procedure are discussed in the light of our medical school’s current practices, and with respect to the limited empirical evidence within medical education assessment. Consideration of implementation is central to ensuring valid and reliable moderation. The reliability of assessor judgements depends more on the consistency of assessment formats and the application of clear and agreed assessment criteria than on the moderation process itself. This article considers these factors in relation to their impact on the reliability of moderation, and aims to help assessors and students appreciate the diversity of these factors by facilitating their consideration in the assessment process.     

Recovery of conditioned fear by a single postextinction shock: Effect of similarity of shock contexts and of time following extinction

Subjects in six experimental groups (n = 16 each) received one-trial passive avoidance (PA) training in which shock was delivered upon movement from a white wooden floor compartment to a black grid compartment. Then fear was extinguished (30 min) in the black compartment. After either 24 or 168 h, all the groups were treated in a room distinctively different from the training room. At each interval, one group received a shock in an apparatus similar to the conditioning box, another received a shock in a dissimilar apparatus, and another was placed in a neutral box. A PA test trial in the training apparatus indicated reinstatement of extinguished fear in all the groups given a postextinction shock except the 24-h dissimilar group. Control groups revealed that the extinction treatment was effective and that spontaneous recovery was not evident. The results were explained in terms of classical conditioning, stimulus generalization, and the broadening (flattening) of stimulus generalization gradients with time.