Globalisation,mergers and ‘inadvertent multi-campus universities’: reflections from Wales

Multi-site universities face the challenge of integrating campuses that may have different profiles and orientations arising from place-specific attachments. Multi-campus universities created via mergers seeking to ensure long-term financial sustainability, and increasing their attractiveness to students, create a tension in campuses’ purposes. We explore how mergers in Wales created ‘inadvertent’ multi-campus universities whilst attempting to increase their overall competitiveness. We highlight three tensions that mergers created for contributing to local places, firstly a tendency for internal concentration, investing for growth in metropolitan not peripheral campuses; secondly, to looking beyond traditional local campuses and creating external campuses (in this case in London); and thirdly, to specialise campuses on the basis of attracting external students not local needs. This creates a substantial challenge for managing multi-campus universities if they are to continue to be able to support the prosperity of more remote regions in an increasingly knowledge-based economy.     

Evaluation of a technology unit in a girls' primary school

Rapid advances in technology are changing the structure of the workforce. There are elite highly-paid hi-tech occupations and low status poorly-paid jobs. Women are unfortunately more likely to be found in the latter category. To allow them to qualify and compete for the higher-status positions, girls need to participate in the physical sciences and in technology studies. However, they are rarely attracted to them in secondary school, possibly because they are already alienated from them by the time they leave primary school. This paper reports some of the outcomes of a curriculum unit taught in two primary school classes in an independent school for girls. The unit was cross-curricular, involving technology, science and other fields of knowledge; it made extensive use of LEGO Technic materials. The evaluation of the unit, based on observations, a teacher journal and pupil questionnaires, focussed upon the issue of whether it assisted the girls to feel happier about working with unfamiliar technology and feel more capable of doing so. Implications for teaching technology are also discussed. M.Ed. St student, Monash University.Specializations: primary school science and technology for girls. Dr. Paul Gardner, Reader in Education, Monash University, 3168.Specializations: science and technology education, technology teacher education, educational evaluation, measurement of attitudes and interests.     

Mental age and syntactic development in the intellectually handicapped

Language samples from five mildly intellectually handicapped subjects with chronological ages ranging from 11 years 0 months to 11 years 8 months, and mental ages ranging from 6 years 2 months to 10 years 1 month were analysed syntactically. The results indicated problems in identifying the relationship between mental age and indices of linguistic sophistication. Most correlations were not significant, and the results suggested that these eleven year old mildly intellectually handicapped children may not show syntactic differences as great as those of mental age. At this age, differences exhibited in language may be due more to variables of individual experience, and especially the teaching strategies they experience. The results do not support the documented hypothesis that language development is closely related to mental age.     

Programmed cell death features in apple suspension cells under low oxygen culture

INTRODUCTION A number of abiotic stresses have been shown to induce programmed cell death (PCD) responses in plant cells. High temperatures (e.g. 55 篊) induce nuclear condensation and DNA fragmentation in cultured carrot, cucumber and Arabidopsis cells (McCabe et al., 1997; McCabe and Leaver, 2000), and also mitochondrial cytochrome c release in cucumber cotyledons (Balk et al., 1999). The PCD pathway also appears to be activated by ozone. Ozone induces an oxidative burst with acc…     

A case study of scientific reasoning

Concern is increasingly being expressed about the teaching of higher order thinking skills in schools and the levels of understanding of scientific concepts by students. Metaphors for the improvement of science education have included science as exploration and science as process skills for experimentation. As a result of a series of studies on how children relate evidence to their theories or beliefs, Kuhn (1993a) has suggested that changing the metaphor to science as argument may be a fruitful way to increase the development of higher order thinking skills and understanding in science instruction. This report is of a case study into the coordination of evidence and theories by a grade 7 primary school student. This student was not able to coordinate these elements in a way that would enable her to rationally consider evidence in relation to her theories. It appeared that the thinking skills associated with science as argument were similar for her in different domains of knowledge and context. Specializations: science learning, scientific reasoning, learning environments, science teacher education. Specializations: cognition, reasoning in science and mathermatics.     

Reliability and concurrent validity of a measure of critical thinking skills in biology

The present study investigated the utility of 52 items, selected from a readily available item pool developed for instructional purposes, when the items are used to measure critical thinking abilities of biology students. The items yield scores that have reasonable internal consistency reliability. Furthermore, analyses involving ACT, Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, and Group Embedded Figures Test scores also suggest that the critical thinking test items have good concurrent validity. Thus, the measure may be useful in both science instruction and future research regarding critical thinking phenomena.