A multivariate analysis of personality, values and expectations as correlates of career aspirations of final year medical students

This study reports on the career intentions of 179 final year medical students who completed an online survey that included measures of personality, values, professional and lifestyle expectations, and well-being. Logistic regression analyses identified the determinants of preferred medical specialty, practice location and hours of work. Understanding the expectations and values of this generation of doctors will assist workforce planners to address expected shortages and mal-distribution of practitioners.     

The Teacher Exception Under the Work for Hire Doctrine: Safeguard of Academic Freedom or Vehicle for Academic Free Enterprise?

According to the “work made for hire doctrine” of the Copyright Act, the creators of artistic and literary works are not legally granted ownership of works created in the course of employment; ownership rests with the employer. However, through de facto custom and court dicta, academics may enjoy a “teacher exception” that grants them copyright ownership of publications and course materials. Though there are several benefits behind this practice, the question of intellectual property ownership has blurred as institutions are investing in distance education and commissioning faculty members to create online courses.     

Young Children's Spatial Representations Developed through Exploration of a Desktop Virtual Reality Scene

Virtual Reality (VR) technology seems to offer the opportunity of designing 3D worlds and navigation activities which provide settings that are close to children's everyday experiences, capitalising on their enthusiasm for videogame-like technologies.This paper describes how different types of exploration of a VR scene by 6[emsp4 ]y-old children affected their performance in a series of spatial tasks. Individual children explored a desktop virtual world where we varied both the visual perspective on the VR scene (route vs. survey view) and the level of exploration control (active vs. passive movement). We measured children's knowledge of the spatial layout of the environment through their memory of objects' location in the virtual scene and through the analysis of their wayfinding abilities within the scene.The results indicate that children were able to develop and display different levels of allocentric knowledge about the virtual world depending on the way they had familiarized with it and on the characteristics of the task demands. This finding contributes to inform the design of VR technologies aimed at supporting or evaluating spatial abilities in children of this age.     

Executive Functions in Young Children with Autism

The executive dysfunction hypothesis of autism has received support from most studies of older people with autism; however, studies of young children have produced mixed results. Two studies are presented that compare the performance of preschoolers with autism (mean = 51 months/4.3 years of age) to a control group matched on age, and verbal and nonverbal ability. The first study (n = 18 autism and 17 control) found no group differences in performance on 8 executive function tasks (A not B, Object Retrieval, A not B with Invisible Displacement, 3-Boxes Stationary and Scrambled, 6-Boxes Stationary and Scrambled, and Spatial Reversal), but did find that children with autism initiated fewer joint attention and social interaction behaviors. The second (longitudinal) study of a subset of the children (n = 13 autism and 11 control) from the first study found that neither groups' performance on Spatial Reversal changed significantly over the course of a year. The results of these studies pose a serious challenge to the executive dysfunction hypothesis of autism.     

Cultural Transfer in Adult Education: The Case of The Folk Development Colleges in Tanzania

This paper examines the issues surrounding the cultural transfer of educational practices and institutions between industrialised countries and developing societies. It pays particular attention to adult education, and – using the case study of the Folk High Schools of Sweden and the Folk Development Colleges of Tanzania between 1975 and 1996 – it tries to develop an argument about the conditions under which such transfers may be successful. It suggests that there needs to be something of a match between the ideologies, discourse and functions of the educational institution within both societies; that the transfer of more than one element of any educational system would assist take-up; that the issue of whether the transfer is a top-down or a bottom-up one is also important; and that such transfers are most successful when the receiving society takes control of the transfer and comes to own it and to adapt it to their own usages. The case study is based on a two year evaluation of the Tanzanian Folk Development Colleges under the aid programme of the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida).