Tutoring the end-of-studies dissertation: helping psychology students find their academic voice when revising academic texts

This intervention study aimed at helping undergraduate students of psychology learn to use the discursive resources useful to make academic voice visible in their texts and to improve their writing practices. The intervention involved tutorial meetings and collaborative revisions in two different learning environments, on-line and face-to face. The final text quality, the students’ knowledge and the amount and the quality of revisions were assessed in both conditions. Results show that the quality of the texts improved for both intervention groups in contrast with for control group, and better texts were related with higher rates of revision and more students’ satisfaction with the intervention.     

Tourism flows and the demand for regional and city theatres in Austria

This paper investigates the impact of tourism flows on demand for large regional and city theatres in Austria over the period from 1972 to 2011 (39 years). The results are obtained by applying an aggregated theatre demand function for both residents and tourists. The elasticity of theatre attendance in response to tourism is estimated along with other standard demand variables such as ticket price and income. The quality factors and theatre-specific effects are also included. The tourism flows variables are derived using detailed data set on tourist arrivals and their overnight counts, and they are also split between domestic and foreign tourists. To measure the impact of tourism flows on theatre demand, three alternative theatre markets specifications are considered. The total elasticity of attendance per capita in response to tourism is estimated between 15 and 20 %, indicating that increasing the number of arrivals by two tourists per resident in the relevant market would generate an increase in theatre attendance by 581–680 thousand visitors per year. The role of tourism flows is found to be particularly important for attendance at opera, operetta and musicals as opposed to attendance at drama performances. The analysis also reveals that foreign, non-German tourists have a positive impact on theatre attendance, whereas domestic tourists do not contribute significantly to higher demand for Austrian theatres.     

Fourth-graders’ justifications in early algebra tasks involving a functional relationship

Educational Studies in Mathematics - In the context of early algebra research and as part of a classroom teaching experiment (CTE), we investigated fourth grade (9- to 10-year-old) students’...     

Teaching writing for learning at university: a proposal based on collaborative review / Enseñar a escribir para aprender en la universidad: una propuesta basada en la revisión colaborativa

This study analyses the relationship between collaborative review and final quality of a text, as part of an intervention in which writing was used as an epistemic tool and students acted alternately as writers and reviewers. Participants included 49 psychology students, who wrote three successive versions of an argumentative synthesis. They received feedback from peers and the teacher for each of these versions. The quality of the final text, suggestions for change provided by the teacher and student reviewers on 196 drafts and the evolution of the texts during the review process were analysed. Results indicated differences regarding the type of comments and the impact on the final text, identified certain aspects of collaborative review that predicted the quality of the final text and showed the existence of different writer and reviewer profiles that had a differential impact on the quality of the final text.     

Higher education inclusivity: when the disability enriches the university

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the perspectives of faculty members on disability in higher education. Their testimonies give value to the attitudes and qualities of university students with disabilities and show how they influence their professional and personal development. We carried out a qualitative study, through interviews with 119 faculty members of different fields from 10 Spanish universities, who were nominated by students with disabilities for developing inclusive pedagogy. We conducted a progressive analysis of the data using a system of categories and codes. The results describe the motivations that drove the participants to respond to the needs of students with disabilities, the personal and professional impact posed by the challenge of adjusting the teaching and learning processes, and the perceptions of the faculty members toward the contributions of these students to the university. In the conclusions section, we delve into the need of universities to embrace inclusivity. The data provided by this study reveal that disability can be a valuable asset in a university context that dissociates from the deficit lens and acknowledges that all students are important and able to learn when the attitudes and conditions are appropriate.