The Potential Effects of Wider Access to Higher Education on Degree Quality

Against a background of rapidly increasing enrolment, both actual and planned, and the improbability of increasing resources, this paper explores the relationship between degree results and entry qualifications amongst students in all sectors of higher education.     

The BASES expert statement on exercise, immunity, and infection

An individual's level of physical activity influences their risk of infection, most likely by affecting immune function. Regular moderate exercise reduces the risk of infection compared with a sedentary lifestyle, but very prolonged bouts of exercise and periods of intensified training are associated with an increased risk of infection. There are several lifestyle, nutritional, and training strategies that can be adopted to limit the extent of exercise-induced immunodepression and minimize the risk of infection. This expert statement provides a background summarizing the evidence together with extensive conclusions and practical guidelines.     

Including people with disabilities: an indigenous perspective

Being victims of racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, disempowerment and language loss it could be expected that indigenous people would be supportive of the Inclusion Movement with its philosophy of valuing and acceptance of all people. This supposition is examined for Māori, the indigenous people of Aotearoa/New Zealand. In particular, three research studies investigating Māori perspectives of intellectual disability, blindness and vision impairment, and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are examined for evidence of inclusive and exclusive attitudes and practices. Findings show that while Māori participants’ opinions varied, people with intellectual disabilities, ASD, blindness and vision impairment were generally valued family members and many examples of inclusive attitudes and practices were shared. Core Māori values support Inclusion. It is proposed that incorporating these values into education and disability services will not only result in more culturally appropriate provisions for Māori but will also contribute to the greater inclusion of all disabled people whatever their ethnicity.     

Situated Self-Regulation: Modeling the Interrelationships Among Instruction,Assessment, Learning Strategies and Academic Performance

To succeed academically, college students must actively construct course information, synthesize this information with information from texts and other resources, understand this information so that they can succeed on various forms of assessments and ultimately retain this information for the long term. While the complexity of these demands has been modeled somewhat metaphorically, there has been little ecologically valid research into learning in authentic classroom contexts. The present study examines the interrelationships among student perceptions of the learning context, test complexity, study strategies, and academic performance. Results of a path analysis demonstrated that perceptions of the teaching format and test complexity were positively related to the study strategies reported, and these study strategies were further related to the reported course performance.     

Visualizing the politics of innocence in the age of AIDS

We are concerned with the ways in which social constructions of age can contribute to reducing or exacerbating the vulnerability of young people, and for this reason we refer to the issue as one of ‘the politics of innocence’. The focus of this paper is on gender, youth and HIV prevention/AIDS awareness in the context of South Africa and investigates the uses (and abuses) of images of ‘childhood’, ‘youth’ and ‘adolescence’ in the age of AIDS. Notwithstanding the particular case of South Africa where the incidence of new cases of HIV infection amongst young people is at crisis proportions, the impetus for our work on the visual representations of youth, gender and AIDS comes out of a recognition of the increasing risk of youth to sexually transmitted infections, HIV and AIDS, and within that the particular vulnerability, worldwide, of young women.