Curriculum and beyond: Mathematics support for first year life science students

The move into higher education is a real challenge for students from all educational backgrounds, with the adaptation to a new curriculum and style of learning and teaching posing a daunting task. A series of exercises were planned to boost the impact of the mathematics support for level four students and was focussed around a core module for all students. The intention was to develop greater confidence in tackling mathematical problems in all levels of ability and to provide more structured transition period in the first semester of level 4. Over a two-year period the teaching team for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology provided a series of structured formative tutorials and “interactive” online problems. Video solutions to all formative problems were made available, in order that students were able to engage with the problems at any time and were not disadvantaged if they could not attend. The formative problems were specifically set to dovetail into a practical report in which the mathematical skills developed were specifically assessed. Students overwhelmingly agreed that the structured formative activities had broadened their understanding of the subject and that more such activities would help. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that the package of changes undertaken resulted in a significant increase in the overall module mark over the two years of development.

Increasing inter-generational social mobility: is educational expansion the answer?

Reforms which increase the stock of education in a society have long been held by policy-makers as key to improving rates of intergenerational social mobility. Yet, despite the intuitive plausibility of this idea, the empirical evidence in support of an effect of educational expansion on social fluidity is both indirect and weak. In this paper we use the raising of the minimum school leaving age from 15 to 16 years in England and Wales in 1972 to estimate the effect of educational participation and qualification attainment on rates of intergenerational social class mobility. Because, in expectation, children born immediately before and after the policy was implemented are statistically exchangeable, the difference in the amount of education they received may be treated as exogenously determined. The exogenous nature of the additional education gain means that differences in rates of social mobility between cohorts affected by the reform can be treated as having been caused by the additional education. The data for the analysis come from the ONS Longitudinal Study, which links individual records from successive decennial censuses between 1971 and 2001. Our findings show that, although the reform resulted in an increase in educational attainment in the population as a whole and a weakening of the association between attainment and class origin, there was no reliably discernible increase in the rate of intergenerational social mobility.

Leading as designing: how educational developers in leadership and management studies can use architectural design to facilitate student learning about delivering innovation

This paper describes a qualitative observational study of how a work based learning masters leadership development programme for middle managers in health and social care in the UK introduced students to key aspects of delivering innovation, through a formative assignment on contemporary architectural design. Action learning and activity theoretical approaches were used to enable students to explore common principles of leading the delivery of innovation. Between 2001 and 2013 a total of 89 students in 7 cohorts completed the assignment. Evaluation lent support for the view that the assignment provided a powerful learning experience for many. Several students found the creativity, determination and dedication of architects, designers and structural engineers inspirational in their ability to translate a creative idea into a completed artefact, deploy resources and negotiate complex demands of stakeholders. Others expressed varying levels of self-empowerment as regards their capacity for fostering an equivalent creativity in self and others. Theoretical approaches in addition to activity theory, including Engeström’s concepts of stabilisation knowledge and possibility knowledge, are discussed to explain these differing outcomes and to clarify the challenges and opportunities for educational developers seeking to utilise cross-disciplinary, creative approaches in curriculum design.

Applying gaze-contingent training within community settings to infants from diverse SES backgrounds

Even in infancy children from low-SES backgrounds differ in frontal cortex functioning and, by the start of preschool, they frequently show poor performance on executive functions including attention control. These differences may causally mediate later difficulties in academic learning. Here, we present a study to assess the feasibility of using computerized paradigms to train attention control in infants, delivered weekly over five sessions in early intervention centres for low-SES families. Thirty-three 12-month-old infants were recruited, of whom 23 completed the training. Our results showed the feasibility of repeat-visit cognitive training within community settings. Training-related improvements were found, relative to active controls, on tasks assessing visual sustained attention, saccadic reaction time, and rule learning, whereas trend improvements were found on assessments of short-term memory. No significant improvements were found in task switching. These results warrant further investigation into the potential of this method for targeting ‘at-risk’ infants in community settings.

Heterogeneous Agglomeration

Many prior treatments of agglomeration explicitly or implicitly assume that all industries agglomerate for the same reasons. This paper uses UK establishment-level coagglomeration data to document substantial heterogeneity across industries in the microfoundations of agglomeration economies. It finds robust evidence of organizational and adaptive agglomeration forces as discussed by Chinitz (1961), Vernon (1960), and Jacobs (1969). These forces interact with the traditional Marshallian (1890) factors of input sharing, labor pooling, and knowledge spillovers, establishing a previously unrecognized complementarity between the approaches of Marshall and Jacobs, as well as others, to the analysis of agglomeration.

Women in the driving seat Eastern European immigrant women s citizenship participation and educational inclusion in Portugal

This paper is a case study of Eastern European immigrant women’s social inclusion in Portugal through civic participation. An analysis of interviews conducted with women leaders and members of two ethnic associations provides a unique insight into their migrant pathways as highly educated women and the ways in which these women are constructing their citizenship in new contexts in Northern Portugal. These women’s accounts of their immigrant experience embrace both the public realm, in using their own education and their children’s as a means of integration but also spill over into ‘non-public’ familial relationships at home in contradictory ways. These include the sometimes traditional, gender-defined division of labour within the associations and at home and the new ways that they negotiate their relative autonomies to escape forms of violence and subordination that they face as women and immigrants.