Psychological Resources as Stress Buffers: Their Relationship to University Students' Anxiety and Depression

The association of protective resources, personality variables, life events, and gender with anxiety and depression was examined with university students. Building on regression analyses, a structural equation model was generated with good fit, indicating that with respect to both anxiety and depression, negative life events and coping resources were mediated by a common distress factor. Personality variables were associated with anxiety, which in turn had a direct relationship to depression.     

Governance through Philitainment: Playing the Benevolent Subject

This article analyzes Free Rice within the context of “the rise of the ludic sublime,” where video games are hailed as the solution to highly sophisticated political problems. As part of what we call practices of “philitainment,” Free Rice, we argue, functions within the political domain of what Jodi Dean has termed “communicative capitalism” and therefore both captures resistance and actually solidifies global capitalism. Ultimately, this case study of Free Rice reveals ways in which practices of philitainment signal the proliferation of a convergence between the technological sublime and neoliberal politics through which the disinvestment of the state from social problems is legitimized and reproduced through a reconfiguration of citizenship in terms of techno-consumerism.     

Inoculating Against Pro-Plagiarism Justifications: Rational and Affective Strategies

Student plagiarism continues to threaten academic integrity. This investigation assessed whether an inoculation message strategy could combat university plagiarism by protecting student attitudes against pro-plagiarism justification arguments. Additionally, we sought theoretical confirmation of previous findings on involvement and accessibility in inoculation, examined the effects on vested interest, and evaluated matching and mismatching strategies in terms of affect- and rationality-based inoculation treatment messages and subsequent attack messages. A total of 225 students participated in three sessions spanning six weeks. Results indicated that none of the inoculation treatments conferred resistance as measured in attitude toward plagiarism, but all treatments enhanced involvement and attitude accessibility, and the fear- and rationality-based treatments enhanced vested interest. Additionally, fear-based treatments derogated the source of the message. Results also suggest that a matching strategy is superior with both affect- and rationality-based attack messages, such that inoculation treatments are most effective when using the same argument bases (e.g., affective or rational) as the attack message. These results offer guidance for crafting communication campaign strategies to reduce the occurrence of student plagiarism offenses.     

Debt: the reality of student life

During the 1980s, a political consensus developed concerning the need to increase participation in higher education (Walker and Wright, 1990). How to finance this increase, however, was a matter of contention. While successive Conservative governments demonstrated a commitment to increasing the number of students, this aim was subordinate to their central concern of controlling public expenditure, which meant they were not prepared to meet the cost of expansion totally from the public purse. As a consequence, alternative ways of financing students were introduced which, as this paper will demonstrate, have led to a higher education system subsidized by student debt.     

Governmentality and the Sociology of Education: Media,educational policy and the politics of resentment

This paper argues that theorizations of the state which are sensitive to both its durability and its permeability, and theorizations which can account for the massive interconnections between local and global forces as well as different material and discursive sites are missing from contemporary work in the sociology of education. Drawing on Foucault's notion of 'governmentality' as a key resource for addressing this impasse, the authors highlight the constant fabrication of racial identity through the production of the pure space of racial origins or 'resentment'—the process of defining one's identity through the negation of the other. This dynamic, the article maintains, now informs key discourses both in popular culture and education. The authors conclude that these processes operate in tandem in the prosecution of the politics of racial exclusion in our times, informing key policy debates, including those around affirmative action and bilingual education.     

Reasons for giving reasons: an expert‐expert clinical analysis of science teaching for non‐academic students 1

This paper concerns the importance of providing reasons and evidence when making claims as a teacher. Two teaching contexts are explored: a nonacademic science classroom and a clinical supervision setting. An expert teacher is seen at work in a nonacademic science classroom. This is an especially significant context in which to find “task‐reasons” and “science‐reasons” since students rarely appear to have access to reasons for what they do or say in such classrooms. The teacher and a colleague, both experts at clinical analysis of teaching, are observed examining and analysing the teaching. This is the setting for developing “interpretation‐reasons” regarding the conduct and events of teaching. The expert‐expert clinical supervision situation is seen as sharpening the requirement for sound, credible interpretation‐reasons beyond that of the more common expert‐novice interaction.

     

Developing a science teacher education course that supports student teachers’ thinking and teaching about the nature of science

This paper reports on part of an ongoing research project in England concerning the Nature of Science (NOS). The particular focus is on the initial thinking of the graduate scientists starting a one-year, Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) course and the way the course approaches adopted influence their views and understanding of NOS and their teaching. The research is set against a wealth of literature indicating that teachers find it difficult to teach curricula that emphasise NOS. Thus a key impetus for research in this area has been to look for ways that beginning teachers might be better prepared to face such challenges.

Sample

The paper draws on data from three cohorts of secondary PGCE students in a university–schools partnership, involving a total of 169 students.

Design and method

The research lies within a design research tradition. It has used mixed methods, involving written tasks, interviews and focus groups, with an iterative approach where the outcomes from one cohort have been used to inform course developments in successive years.

Results

The results from these cohorts suggest that, while the students starting the course have a less restricted view of NOS than indicated by some other studies, in most cases there is a lack of breadth and depth to their understanding. There is some evidence that the use of specific tasks focusing on NOS in university-based sessions may be helping to develop and deepen understanding. However, the impact of current approaches remains fairly limited and attempts to develop teaching practices often face considerable barriers in the school-based practicum.

Conclusions

Graduate science students’ understanding of NOS as they embark on the PGCE is not highly developed. Hence, the emphasis on aspects of NOS in the school curriculum presents a considerable challenge. This study suggests that there is a need to both further develop an explicit focus on NOS in university-based sessions and to develop closer relationships between schools and university faculty in seeking to support developments in classroom practice in this difficult area.