Further and Higher Education

ABSTRACT Procrastination is a common source of academic struggles among college students. Prior research suggests that procrastination tendencies are amenable to change, but the mechanisms behind successful interventions are not fully understood. In a small-scale intervention study, college students who self-identified as procrastinators maintained biweekly journals and participated in a one-on-one, semi-structured interview about their experiences. The journaling tool built upon principles of self-monitoring and reflective writing to bring greater awareness to students’ behaviours. With the raw journal entries and verbatim interview transcripts as data sources, inductive thematic analysis was used to understand how the journaling experience influenced students’ procrastination tendencies. Findings indicated that journaling spurred four pivotal processes: understanding procrastination, making changes in the moment, motivating action, and finding direction for change. The findings shed light on student-directed change and can inform practices aimed at reducing college students’ procrastination.

A pilot survey of science students conducted by Cook & Leckey confirmed that student study habits formed in secondary school persist to the end of the first semester of university life. Such a conclusion indicates that students are not bridging the gap between school and ...

This article explores the issue of preparing trainee teachers for the challenges of how to face their students’ ‘disruptive behaviour’ which sometimes marks the beginning and sets the tone for the remainder of sessions. In this paper I explore my work mentoring two trainee teachers, looking at the options available to them on entering classrooms where students displayed disruptive behaviour. There is a context of Ofsted criteria, whereby disruptive behaviour is no longer acceptable and ‘failure’ is allocated as an observation grade where ‘disruptive behaviour’ occurs. This piece offers an exploration of classroom management strategies for preparing trainee teachers who face challenging situations in Further Education (FE) environments and suggests strategies for dealing with the difficulties of disruptive classes. The reason why this is vitally important is because trainee teachers in Cert Ed classes wish to discuss this issue more than any other topic. It affects their self-esteem, confidence and class interaction in delivering the curriculum.

This POSTnote provides an overview of adult upskilling and retraining in the UK. It outlines the national context around adult education, including issues around supply and demand of skills as well as funding and participation rates. It also discusses the key outcomes and impacts of adult learning. This briefing focuses on 19+ adult learning and excludes university education.

While the student grants loans versus grants debate in the UK has tended to focus on the practical obstacles to such a scheme, this paper in contrast examines the case for replacing maintenance grants by a system of student loans in the light of the theoretical literature on the nature of higher education. The following section reviews the reasons for state support of higher education, while the third section goes on to explore the alternative forms this support could take. The fourth section briefly outlines the current UK system and the fifth then analyses the arguments which have been offered for moving to an alternative, loans- based arrangement. The final section sets out the paper's main conclusion, which is that the case for loans as conventionally presented is seriously flawed and fails to address the issues involved.

This article examines the lived experience of working women with 'children' (defined as under 18 years old (NSPCC, 2020) undertaking part-time PhD study. While there exists wide literature on the isolation of doctoral experience, 'mothers' and all this identity may entail, has been overlooked. Drawing on 35 in-depth interviews, the experiences of this marginalised group in the higher education sector are explored. The study's findings underline the tension between the public, private and professional domains, and the important role online Communities of Practice (CoP) can play in overcoming peripherality and helping to manage the context of gendered organizational cultures. The article highlights the role of online CoP in enhancing the experience of an otherwise marginalized group, providing a space for selfexpression, the development of a shared repertoire, and mutual engagement. It also has resonance in relation to the changing situation generated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The paper analyses the relatively new phenomenon of neuromarketing and the possible inclusion into learner’s studies in UK Further and Higher education sectors. The constant argument of marketing being defined as an art or a science has spanned over decades, however the developments in neurology and using it for marketing purposes can change the outlook for many marketers. Avoiding the inclusion of such a sizeable development would mean that learners in the UK would be outdated to current practices.

After the simulation of the Brix and Pol percentages on sheet-III completed and have the values shown underneath conform to the limitation, then on sheet-IV can be seen the overall result of calculation in the following pages, which consist of:

As one of the allied health professions, occupational therapy has adopted a primarily clinical focus on human occupation (or the process of daily life) and this is reflected in education, which has until recently tended to overlook contextual social factors such as poverty, marginalisation, exclusion, unemployment, incarceration and immigration. However, daily life is enabled, and potentially dis-abled, along the axes of several cultural and political constructs, such as gender, employment status and ethnicity. This article presents a critical commentary of the social responsibility of occupational therapy education. Furthermore, it discusses the need for educational practices that can enact an integration of personal and professional perspectives so as to lead to a more holistic understanding of occupation, incorporating not only clinical but also social and political factors. This article argues for the development of a political approach to occupational therapy education that can...

That is not to say that there are no negative issues within FE colleges these days. It is my belief , based on experiences, that such colleges are perhaps not the best environments to teach HE courses. There have been times that issues of QA have occurred within courses I have been engaged with – largely because the SOW laid down by the department has been taught at an FE standard basis i.e. to assessment, rather than in the usual university way of knowledge base from which assessment arises. Students are often ‘spoon fed’ and classes made up of those who, given levels of previous learning, cannot really meet the demands of this level of scholarship  and yet are taken on it seems to make up the numbers so that the courses can run and appease both institution and government targets.

When Louis Pasteur remarked that chance favours the prepared mind, he was commenting on the important role played by serendipity in scientific discovery. That role is well known (most know of the story of Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin) but much of the literature focuses on the STEM disciplines, on ‘big’ science, and concentrates on the work of established scientists. There is virtually no discussion of the role of serendipity in the doctoral research arena, an arena which contributes significantly to contemporary scientific endeavour and the associated publications. This article reports the initial results from a survey of doctoral students and PhD graduates which explores how serendipity contributes to the PhD process and also the forms serendipity takes in this arena. Following the conceptual differentiation of serendipity from accident or chance, the article explores the intersection of serendipity with doctoral research. Most respondents reported serendipitous occurrences happening in the doctoral experience, with the most important involving them stumbling across unexpected and unsearched-for literature, meeting others who proved to be significant for both their research and also their future development and careers, and finding project-related artefacts which expanded their projects and thinking. There were also reports of second-hand serendipity a hitherto uncommented on phenomenon. Many of the serendipitous occurrences involved a social context and actors other than the doctoral student, placing a focus on the researcher as someone with the ability and opportunities to make connections rather than simply relying on luck.

Over the past thirty years universities have increasingly extended their offerings of vocationally oriented degrees and have recruited into academe, practitioners from the professions. This paper reports on a qualitative study that investigated the experiences of 20 professionals-turned-academics in Australia; their expectations of academe and how they defined, resisted and took up the multiple and changing roles associated with academic work. Findings indicate that the majority experienced nostalgia for universities of the past which they imagined to be places of intellectual elitism and curiosity-driven research and scholarship. At the same time, they identified strongly as practitioners within their professional fields, were committed to field-oriented practical education and resisted taking up researcher identities, understanding ‘real’ research in narrowly defined terms. Our discussion of these findings highlights the tension between what is desired and what is real in academe and its impact on job performance and satisfaction for this group of academics.