Tradition versus Technology: Careers Fairs in the 21st Century

The traditional methods ofgraduate recruitment do not adequately meet theneeds of the changing profile of students andgraduates. As industry becomesinternationalised, the needs of employers arealso changing. Graduate recruitment is inresponse to short term needs and varying levelsof experience are required. A case study methodwas used in Dublin Institute of Technology toevaluate the effectiveness of a virtual careersfair in providing greater access to jobopportunities for students and graduates.Access by employers to potential employees wasalso measured. Findings showed that whileaccess improved, other issues requiringattention emerged.     

HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE WORLD OF WORK: AN OVERVIEW

This article presents an overview of the state of the art in studies of higher education and the world of work, based on papers, some of which are published in this issue, presented at the 1992 annual meeting of the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers. It considers the contributions made to the study of the subject by different disciplines and sketches the range of relationships between higher education and work. It discusses the contribution of higher education to the labour market, its diversity and dynamics, and the employment experiences of graduates. It analyses the different value systems of the two sides, their expressions of needs, and reciprocal impacts. It asks what role government and institutions play in effecting the relationship. It analyses the knowledge and skills content of higher education. And, finally, it offers a research agenda. The emphasis of the paper is on the substantive issues against their institutional and structural aspects.     

Profiles Obtained from Clustering Behaviours in Situations Rated on Infant Temperament Dimensions

When working with parents trying to cope with an exceptional child in a family setting, it is often difficult to meaningfully illustrate their views of the child's current behaviours and/or changes brought about by deliberate interventions. One approach outlined in the present paper involves obtaining from participants their ratings on a number of bi‐polar “temperament” dimensions of behaviours which a child may display in different situations. These data are then subjected to a cluster analysis which displays correspondences graphically, in a form which can be discussed directly. An example drawn from the authors’ involvement with parents coping with crying babies is provided.     

University student anonymity in the summative assessment of written work

This paper provides an overview of the issue of student anonymity in the summative assessment of student work in higher education. It considers both theoretical literature pertaining to bias in the evaluation of the work of others and the limited empirical work undertaken on this issue in higher education. It then describes the experience of three higher education institutions in their institutional consideration of student anonymity in assessment. It concludes with an attempt to integrate three perspectives from teaching and learning theory into the anonymity debate, which has largely been conceived in terms of institutional policy, and suggests that there is scope for much further teaching and learning research in the area.     

Validating the Hornik & Woolf approach to choosing media campaign themes: Do promising beliefs predict behavior change in a longitudinal study?

Hornik and Woolf (1999) proposed using cross-sectional survey data to prioritize beliefs to address with communication campaign messages. The empirical component of the approach combines evidence of (1) association of beliefs with intentions and (2) current level of beliefs to calculate a “percentage to gain” as the potential promise of a belief. However, the method relies on cross-sectional data; its conclusions are open to challenge. Here, a panel study assesses whether the calculated promise of a belief actually predicts future behavior change. A nationally representative sample of 3,204 U.S. youth and young adults were interviewed twice, six months apart. Sixteen beliefs about the benefits and costs of smoking cigarettes are compared with regard to their percentage to gain (calculated from cross-sectional data) and their ability to account for subsequent cigarette use. A belief’s cross-sectional percentage to gain is substantially associated with its ability to predict subsequent behavior change (r = .53, p < .05).     

Teacher education as academic work: the affordances of a materialist analysis

In this paper we make an argument for paying close attention to the materiality of practice in understanding the work of teacher educators; specifically, the meanings of artefacts used by teacher educators in the course of their daily work. We locate this analysis within a dialectical materialist understanding of the development of human activity, providing examples of artefacts-in-use in initial teacher education and the meanings accorded to these artefacts by the teacher educators we observed and interviewed. Our aim is to make a case for what is afforded epistemologically when researchers pay attention to artefacts from a dialectical materialist viewpoint. In the final part of the paper, we argue that paying attention to how teacher educators engage with artefacts can help us understand the unity of psychological and social processes within dominant approaches to teacher education, as well as providing clues about how adaptation of artefacts can drive cultural change.     

Use of Contextual Information and Prediction by Struggling Adult Readers: Evidence From Reading Times and Event-Related Potentials

We employed self-paced reading and event-related potential measures to investigate how adults of varying literacy levels use sentence context information when reading. Community-dwelling participants read strongly and weakly constraining sentences that ended with expected or unexpected target words. Skilled readers showed N400s that were graded by the cloze probability of the targets, with larger N400s for more unexpected words. Moreover, it took these participants longer to read unexpected targets in strongly than weakly constraining sentences, suggesting a processing cost for revising predictions. Among less skilled readers, a reliable N400 difference was found between expected and unexpected targets only for the strongly constraining sentences. They also took longer when targets were unexpected, regardless of the context. These findings suggest that lower literacy readers could only immediately take advantage of strongly constraining context information to facilitate word processing and that they do not make as much use of predictive processing during comprehension.     

Reflect, ‘refract’ or reveal: sociocultural explorations of the place of teacher subjectivity in infant care

Research indicates that adult sensitivity to psychological states (both the adult’s and the infant’s) will affect the security of attachment yet the teacher’s internal state has received little attention in infant care. ‘Perezhivanie’ is a sociocultural concept that presents affect and intellect as a unit rather than separate elements. ‘Refraction’, a related concept, positions teacher subjectivity as the reference point for understanding caregiving behaviour as all thinking and behaviour is ‘refracted’ through the emotional prism of the person’s feeling state. This article discusses an emerging finding from a qualitative case study investigating early childhood teachers’ subjective and affective experiences of infant care. Early findings suggest teachers have difficulty expressing the personal and emotional nature of their work which appears at odds with studies confirming the significance of adult affect in adult–infant relationships. Theoretical and methodological explanations for the teachers’ silence are explored and implications discussed. ‘Refraction’ is presented as a supplementary theoretical tool to increase understanding of the personal and emotional nature of infant care.