Mature and younger students' reasons for making the transition from further education into higher education

This paper reviews findings from a longitudinal study of students making the transition from FE to an ancient university. This paper compares the younger and older students' reasons for higher education study. Our analysis of the quantitative data suggests that the older students had different reasons for entering university. We use the qualitative data to investigate the meanings participants attributed to higher education study in order to make sense of the patterns in the quantitative data, drawing on Wenger's perspectives on identity development as encompassing participants' trajectories in relation to communities of practice. The findings show a positive picture of the motivations of the whole cohort but the mature students seemed to have a particularly rich understanding of the meaning and relevance of their studies. The study therefore has implications for policy-makers and teachers as they seek to make use of the positive aspects of greater diversity.     

Public policy as information

Clearly, public policy-making is an activity that both generates and uses information. Both the role of public policy in relation to informational assets and the role of information technologies have been widely canvassed, But can the concept of information itself be used analytically to understand public policy-making? In pursuit of this objective, key theories of public policy are re-interpreted from an informational perspective using a process of reciprocal interrogation. From this analysis, three types of informational role are identified within the policy process: response, control and accountability; structured interaction; and meaning-making. In summary, it is argued that public policy enables collective responses to problems to be formulated and implemented through information transmission and signalling. Through institutional pattern-making, public policy structures and selects information flows. Finally, information forms the basis of meaning-making in public policy. As a result of this exploration, some suggestions are made as to how these concepts may be used to improve policy-making.     

Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience: Insights From Deafness

The condition of deafness presents a developmental context that provides insight into the biological, cultural, and linguistic factors underlying the development of neural systems that impact social cognition. Studies of visual attention, behavioral regulation, language development, and face and human action perception are discussed. Visually based culture and language provides deaf children with affordances that promote resiliency and optimization in their development of visual engagement, executive functions, and theory of mind. These experiences promote neural adaptations permitting nuanced perception of classes of linguistic and emotional-social behaviors. Studies of deafness provide examples of how interactions and contributions of biological predispositions and genetic phenotypes with environmental and cultural factors including childhood experiences and actions of caregivers shape developmental trajectories ( M. I. Posner & M. K. Rothbart, 2007 ).     

Transformative Teaching: Restoring the teacher, under erasure

In the large and complex landscape of pedagogy, the focus seems to have turned away from the concept of teaching and towards a stronger emphasis on learning, probably supported by neo-liberal ideology. The teacher is presented more as part of the force of production than as an autonomous performer of a mandate given to him/her by society. He/she is supposed to supply knowledge that is considered useful to a society geared to production and consumption. During the past few decades, enlightenment as a legitimising concept for education has been challenged from different angles, both by a self-critique from within and from external forces. One angle of approach is the questioning of the relationship between the state and education, by way of a critique of modernity. Another approach comes from a critique of knowledge, which has lost most of its universal implications and is left with more pragmatic and utilitarian considerations. Into this landscape of lost legitimisation, I will make an attempt to visualise an impossible/possible position for teaching, featuring ancient, contemporary and phantom-like figures. I am suggesting the concept of transformation as an alternative to development or improvement, which I find to be concepts with a close link to modernity and its linearity. By a careful and conscious use of the word transformation, taking Derrida's intensified focus of language into account, a possible active position might be intimated in spite of the fundamental critique, which has been directed at pedagogy and its imperialistic implications from different angles.     

Statistical Learning in a Natural Language by 8-Month-Old Infants

Numerous studies over the past decade support the claim that infants are equipped with powerful statistical language learning mechanisms. The primary evidence for statistical language learning in word segmentation comes from studies using artificial languages, continuous streams of synthesized syllables that are highly simplified relative to real speech. To what extent can these conclusions be scaled up to natural language learning? In the current experiments, English‐learning 8‐month‐old infants’ ability to track transitional probabilities in fluent infant‐directed Italian speech was tested (N = 72). The results suggest that infants are sensitive to transitional probability cues in unfamiliar natural language stimuli, and support the claim that statistical learning is sufficiently robust to support aspects of real‐world language acquisition.     

Supporting mature-aged students from a low socioeconomic background

The aim of the current study was to examine mature-aged student perceptions of university support services and barriers to study. Using a mixed methods approach, interviews and focus groups were conducted with mature-aged students to identify barriers to study, knowledge and use of current student support services, and suggestions to improve upon these services. From these data and an audit of university support services, an online survey was created to examine study barriers and patterns of support service use, as well as, perceptions of proposed support services not currently offered by the university within a larger sample of mature-aged students. Analysis of survey data indicated distinct patterns of barriers and support service use according to socioeconomic status as well as other demographic factors such as, age and enrolment status. Study findings are discussed in terms of generating support services for the retention of mature-aged students of low socioeconomic status and for the retention of mature-aged students in general.     

Beyond the domestic sphere? A home science education at the University of New Zealand, 1911–1936

International developments in the field of household science, debates about women’s rights to a higher education and changes in workforce demographics came together in the first decade of the twentieth century to facilitate the establishment of a School of Home Science at the University of Otago. The early years were characterised by struggles over the nature of the curriculum, conflicts with university administrators and difficulties maintaining a commitment to high academic standards while meeting the competing expectations of the public, university administrators and the Department of Education that students would become technically proficient in the practical household arts. Despite the ongoing struggle for academic and scientific credibility and its location in a low‐status ‘domestic’ sphere of higher education, a home science qualification provided an alternative pathway to an increasing range of professional and academic careers, at a time when most women graduating with arts and science degrees entered teaching.     

Application of construal level and value-belief norm theories to undergraduate decision-making on a wildlife socio-scientific issue

One aim of science education is to develop scientific literacy for decision-making in daily life. Socio-scientific issues (SSI) and structured decision-making frameworks can help students reach these objectives. This research uses value belief norm (VBN) theory and construal level theory (CLT) to explore students’ use of personal values in their decision-making processes and the relationship between abstract and concrete problematization and their decision-making. Using mixed methods, we conclude that the level of abstraction with which students problematise a prairie dog agricultural production and ecosystem preservation issue has a significant relationship to the values students used in the decision-making process. However, neither abstraction of the problem statement nor students’ surveyed value orientations were significantly related to students’ final decisions. These results may help inform teachers’ understanding of students and their use of a structured-decision making tool in a classroom, and aid researchers in understanding if these tools help students remain objective in their analyses of complex SSIs.