Collaboration Between Counseling Services and an Academic Program: An Exploratory Study of Student Outcome

This study assessed the progress of students involved in a collaborative early warning intervention conducted by counseling services and a teacher preparation program. Results indicated that counseling services increased both students' academic and social integration and their confidence in their ability to teach and perform the duties of a teacher. Findings and implications are discussed.     

Realities and Feelings in the Work of Primary Heads

This article examines the affective nature of day‐to‐day primary school headship. The author points to differences in the kinds of tasks that heads do each day and suggests that these determine their prevailing feelings. A distinction is made between work that merely keeps the school operating and work that helps the head to shape the school. It is argued that the former provides few satisfactions for heads, while satisfactions gained from the latter are often transient. Spending time with children is an aspect of ‘personal work’ that provides heads with their most deeply felt satisfactions. One effect of the government's reforms is to intensify those features of heads’ work that offer little emotional sustenance, while eroding those that do     

Using the Objective Borderline Method (OBM) to support Board of Examiners’ decisions in a medical programme

Decisions about progress through an academic programme are made by Boards of Examiners, on the basis of students’ course assessments. For most students such pass/fail grading decisions are straightforward. However, for those students whose results are borderline (either at a pass/fail boundary or boundaries between grades) the exercise of some discretion by university staff is required. In the interests of the transparency of the exercise of this discretion and to increase the chances that the ‘right’ decision is made, we tested the validity of the second version of the Objective Borderline Method (OBM2) decision-making tool in a medical programme. Our results suggest that application of OBM2 provides valid data to help university staff make robust decisions about a student’s progression through a programme, and with which to defend these decisions if that should be required.     

Marketing undergraduates' attitudes towards query-based instructional machines as a possible learning medium

Six hundred and seventy-one undergraduates completed a questionnaire concerning their reactions to the idea that parts of their degree programmes might be delivered via Query Based Instructional Machines. The latter are commonplace in museums and other cultural attractions. They are menu-driven and operate on the touch-screen principle, thus allowing the user to browse through whichever aspects of a subject the person finds most interesting. Cognitive, affective and conative responses were measured and related to students' personal characteristics, degree programme, year of study, level of academic attainment, psychological involvement with a course, and innate tendencies vis-à-vis need for cognition, curiosity, and change leadership. The sample comprised students on three categories of degree programme: marketing, computing, or humanities. An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was completed using aggregated responses as dependent variables, degree type as the fixed factor (grouping variable), and personal characteristics and inclinations as covariates. There were a number of significant differences between the responses of the marketing students and students in the other groups.     

Children's conceptions of the changes of state of water

Children are very familiar with water, ice, and steam as these things have been part of their lives since they first crawled into the kitchen. In this study children's conceptions about familiar phenomena associated with water, e.g., evaporating, condensing, boiling, and the melting of ice, were investigated using a clinical interview technique. The prevalence of specific views at particular age levels was also studied. The results of the investigation indicate that children do have ideas about the changes of state of water which are quite different from the views of scientists. It would also appear that these ideas can sometimes be influenced in unintended ways by science teaching. The implications of these findings for teaching are discussed.     

INCREASES IN TEST SCORES AS A FUNCTION OF MATERIAL REWARDS

In this study 81 experimental and 79 control subjects (randomly assigned to treatments) took Form A of the Nelson Reading Test, twice, with a four week interval between test administrations. Instructions for the retest varied for the E and C groups. The latter group was told that the test was readministered for purposes of assessing improvement. The E subjects were informed that by improving their previous score they would be eligible for winning a prize (candy bars, university sweaters, radios). Analysis of covariance indicated that the effect of the awards was significant (p < .01) in terms of number of items attempted and in terms of items correct. The adjusted mean increase for the E subjects was three months. The authors concluded that, if the terms of an actual performance contract would be applied to their results, they were to realize approximately $3,000 profit on a $75 investment.