School Work,Homework and Gender

This paper explores female and male students' attitudes towards school work in terms of application and achievement. The data are drawn from interviews with students, teachers, careers officers and welfare officers in three semi‐rural comprehensive schools in one local education authority (LEA) [1]. (The students were in their last year of compulsory schooling, Year 11, and were aged 16 [2].) The three schools had invited the authors to explore why boys were achieving below their potential in terms of course work and end of course grades. The findings of the study show how school, peer group and community factors influence students' attitudes towards school work and homework. However, the situation is not just one of boys' under‐performance: the pattern of girls' achievement at 16 (the school leaving age) is not always carried through post‐16 or into career destinations. The problem is one of ‘equalising opportunities’ for all young people, taking into account the different patterns of need at different stages in their school careers.     

Participation,financial support and the marginal student

This paper examines differences between the decision-making of marginal and nonmarginal students about participation in higher education (HE). We distinguish between two kinds of marginality: being ‘borderline’ on account of prior achievements in school and being ‘unsure’ after taking prior achievement into account. We identify a significant minority of students in their final year of schooling who are unsure about participation in higher education even though they have prior school achievements typical of entrants to HE. Being ‘unsure’ is found to be unrelated to socioeconomic background, but it is associated with significantly different attitudes towards the potential benefits and risks of participation, different levels of knowledge about financial support that is available and different approaches to information search about participation in HE.

Are Letter Detection and Proofreading Tasks Equivalent?

When readers search for misspellings in a proofreading task or for a letter in a letter detection task, they are more likely to omit function words than content words. However, with misspelled words, previous findings for the letter detection task were mixed. In two experiments, the authors tested the functional equivalence of both tasks. Results reveal similar patterns of omissions for both search tasks when misspellings were produced by substituting one letter for another: There were more omissions for function words than for content words. However, when two letters were transposed, differences between the two tasks emerged. It is possible to conclude that letter detection and proofreading are based on common cognitive processes but the nature of the target can modulate the effects. Results are interpreted in light of the attentional disengagement model and the guidance organization model of the missing-letter effect.