HEALTHY AGING: A NEW PERSPECTIVE FOR PUBLIC POLICY

Recognition of the diversity that exists among older Americans has stimulated thinking about the implications of these differences for public policymaking. The emergence of the healthy elderly has contributed to the breaking down of stereotypes of older people as being characterized by illness and infirmity and has initiated a discussion of new policies based on older persons’ ability to continue making productive contributions to society. This article presents an overview of several authors whose work provides insight into the rationale and potential of formulating public policy aimed at utilizing the resources of the elderly, as contrasted with the present effort of meeting the vulnerabilities of old age.     

Commitment and Relatedness: How College Students Use Religious Coping to Manage Anxiety

Anxiety is a common symptom among college counseling clients. Perhaps because of the unique developmental tasks they face, many later adolescents (ages 18–24 years) use religious coping to manage anxiety. Many counselors are uncertain about how to address religious themes in therapy, if at all. However, most clients of faith do not want counselors to ignore their religious beliefs. In fact, later adolescents may use faith‐based coping mechanisms to navigate the challenges of their developmental stage.     

Know your place? Evaluating the therapeutic benefits of engagement with historic landscapes

This paper emphasises the restorative power of engagement with natural/cultural environments by exploring a body of work that identifies the positive impact of the historic environment on the health and well-being of community archaeology participants. Increasing importance has been ascribed to the role of landscape in public health research and to the environmental factors, which contribute to enhanced quality of life. In reviewing the ways that community archaeology projects are evaluated, and in summarising current practice, we observe that the evidence produced is often anecdotal. However, it is possible to increase robust therapeutic evaluation in ways that might be expected from other disciplinary perspectives and to draw on recent work in the role of the arts in health. This paper highlights that many of those currently engaged in community archaeology are self-selecting, and represent only a small subset of society. The narrow scope of engagement is borne out by Heritage Lottery Fund-commissioned research which found that, whilst volunteering has a significant positive impact on participants, they tend to be white, well-educated and live in the most affluent areas. If historic environment practitioners are to claim therapeutic benefits from their work, then the issue of inequity of access to health benefits is a significant concern for the profession. It is not just a matter of social justice but a concern for the arts and humanities sector, which is currently required to justify its public value [Bate, J. (2011). Public value of the humanities. London: Bloomsbury Academic].     

Lexical ambiguity: making a case against spread

We argue for decreasing the use of the word spread when describing the statistical idea of dispersion or variability in introductory statistics courses. In addition, we argue for increasing the use of the word variability as a replacement for spread.     

Writing Apprehension,Computer Anxiety and Telecomputing: a pilot study

ABSTRACT

The current state of the teaching of information technology competency within postgraduate teacher training is summarised from existing literature and weaknesses are identified. Development work in the Loughborough University Primary Postgraduate Certificate of Education course over three successive years is examined and discussed, focusing on the apparent gap between student achievement in the institution and application in classrooms while on school placements. It is argued from qualitative and quantitative evidence that a major factor is the failure of some school placement teachers to provide encouragement to their teaching practice students, and that this is a feature not of schools but of individuals. The conclusion attempts to analyse further that gap and suggests some ways forward.     

Persona Design: Representativeness and Empathy through Cultural Integration

Persona design aims to increase students’ ability to understand their target users and address their needs. Yet, there is a lack of conceptual frameworks that help students systematically conceptualise user needs, specifically the two key requirements of persona design: representativeness and empathy. In this study, we find an alternative method using cultural dimensions to ensure that students conceptualise personas by reflecting representativeness and empathy in a systematic way. We justify cultural dimensions and engagement aspects and suggest a classified table for representative and empathetic persona design. In a design course, we analyse personas created by students in two different groups with the table (Group 1, n = 16) and without the table (Group 2, n = 17) through comparative thematic analysis to evaluate the qualities of representativeness and empathy. As a result, the cognitive aspect of engagement is predominated in Group 2, whereas the cognitive, emotional, behavioural, and social aspects of engagement are evenly distributed in Group 1. 11 cultural dimensions are identified in Group 2, whereas 20 cultural dimensions are identified in Group 1. In Group 2, a particular dimension is predominant (44.4% of individualism), whereas, in Group 1, the rate of the most used dimension is 12.2% (femininity and collectivism). The study results indicate that the method allows students to diversify and deepen their understanding of user needs and thereby conceptualising personas in in-depth and analytical ways. From instructional perspectives, it can be used by educators to help students systematically conceptualise user needs in design activities.