Academic Attainment in Students with Dyslexia in Distance Education.

This investigation studied attainment in students with dyslexia or other specific learning difficulties who were taking modules by distance learning with the Open University in 2012. Students with dyslexia or other specific learning difficulties who had no additional disabilities were just as likely as nondisabled students to complete their modules, but they were less likely to pass the modules that they had completed and less likely to obtain good grades on the modules that they had passed. Students with dyslexia or other specific learning difficulties who had additional disabilities were less likely to complete their modules, less likely to pass the modules that they had completed and less likely to obtain good grades on the modules that they had passed than were nondisabled students.

Achievement goals in adult learners: evidence from distance education.

Background: There is evidence that learners may adopt different kinds of achievement goals: mastery approach, mastery avoidance, performance approach, and performance avoidance. In higher education, this evidence has mainly come from young people who have recently gone straight from secondary education to higher education. However, higher education is increasingly populated by older students, and it has been theorised that the relationship between goals and achievement might be very different for adult learners.

Field independence: reviewing the evidence.

Background: The construct of field independence (FI) remains one of the most widely cited notions in research on cognitive style and on learning and instruction more generally. However, a great deal of confusion continues to exist around the definition of FI, its measurement, and the interpretation of research results, all of which have served to limit our understanding of and practice in education.

Aims: This study reviews research evidence on FI and highlights key issues to frame a more informed agenda for future research.

Approaches to teaching in mainstream and separate postsecondary classrooms.

The study examined attitudes toward teaching reported by university instructors who normally teach hearing students (with the occasional deaf or hard of hearing student) and by instructors who normally teach deaf and hard of hearing students at the same institution. Overall, a view of instruction as information transmission was associated with a teacher-focused approach to instruction, whereas viewing instruction as a means of promoting conceptual change was associated with a student-focused approach. Instructors in mainstream classrooms were more oriented toward information transmission than conceptual change, whereas instructors experienced in separate classrooms for deaf and hard of hearing students reported seeking to promote conceptual change in students and adopting more student-focused approaches to teaching.

Deaf and hard-of-hearing students' experiences in mainstream and separate postsecondary education.

In order to better understand academic achievement among deaf and hard-of-hearing students in different educational placements, an exploratory study examined the experiences of postsecondary students enrolled in mainstream programs (with hearing students) versus separate programs (without hearing students) at the same institution. The Course Experience Questionnaire, the Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory, and the Classroom Participation Questionnaire were utilized to obtain information concerning their perceptions, participation, and access to information in the classroom. Both groups were concerned with good teaching and the acquisition of generic skills.

Conceptions of learning and approaches to studying among White and ethnic minority students in distance education.

Background: The attainment of White students at UK institutions of higher education tends to be higher than that of students from other ethnic groups, but the causes of this are unclear.

Aims: This study compared White students and students from other ethnic groups in their conceptions of learning, their approaches to studying, and their academic attainment.

Sample: A stratified sample of 1,146 White students and 1,146 students from other ethnic groups taking courses by distance learning with the UK Open University.

Conceptions of learning, approaches to studying and personal development in UK higher education.

Background: Students in higher education are known to vary in their conceptions of learning, their approaches to studying, and the personal development and personal change that result.

Aims: This study aimed to explore the relationships among these four aspects of students' experience; to examine whether there were variations across academic subjects and across departments in each subject; and to explore whether there were changes from first year to after graduation.

Sample: Students in the first year and the final year of the undergraduate programmes at 15 departments, five offering each of three subjects: bioscience, business studies, and sociology.

Perceived academic quality and approaches to studying in the health professions.

Background: Students in higher education may adopt different approaches to studying, depending upon their perceptions of the academic quality of their courses and programmes, and both are likely to depend upon the nature of the curricula to which they are exposed.

Aims: Perceptions of quality and approaches to studying were investigated in students taking pre-registration programmes in a school of health professions. Two of the programmes were 3-year undergraduate programmes with subject-based curricula, and two were 2-year entry-level masters programmes with problem-based curricula.

Measures of short-term memory: a historical review.

Following Ebbinghaus (1885/1964), a number of procedures have been devised to measure short-term memory using immediate serial recall: digit span, Knox's (1913) cube imitation test and Corsi's (1972) blocks task. Understanding the cognitive processes involved in these tasks was obstructed initially by the lack of a coherent concept of short-term memory and later by the mistaken assumption that short-term and long-term memory reflected distinct processes as well as different kinds of experimental task. Despite its apparent conceptual simplicity, a variety of cognitive mechanisms are responsible for short-term memory, and contemporary theories of working memory have helped to clarify these.

Mental models of learning in distance education.

Background: Interview-based research has shown that students in higher education hold a number of different conceptions of learning and of themselves as learners. There is debate about whether these conceptions constitute a developmental hierarchy.

Aims: This study evaluated the Mental Models section of Vermunt and van Rijswijk's (1988) Inventory of Learning Styles (ILS) as a measure of students' conceptions of learning and sought to identify conceptions of learning as qualitatively different patterns of scores.

Investigating the relationship between variations in students' perceptions of their academic environment and variations in study behaviour in distance education.

Background: Recent research on student learning in higher education has identified clear associations between variations in students' perceptions of their academic environment and variations in their study behaviour.

Aims: This research investigated a general theoretical model linking students' demographic characteristics, perceptions and study behaviour with measures of outcome and in particular compared four accounts of the casual relationship between perceptions and study behaviour.

Samples: Study 1 employed data from 1,123 students taking six courses by distance learning; Study 2 employed data from 2,049 students taking seven courses by distance learning.

Perceived academic quality and approaches to studying at Danish schools of occupational therapy.

Students in the fourth semester of basic training programmes in occupational therapy at seven different institutions of higher education in Denmark were surveyed using the Course Experience Questionnaire [CEQ] and the Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory [RASI]. The CEQ proved to be a reasonably robust in this setting: most of the scales demonstrated satisfactory reliability, and a factor analysis confirmed its intended constituent structure. The CEQ also discriminated among students at the seven institutions in their patterns of scores.

Knox's cube imitation test: a historical review and an experimental analysis.

The cube imitation test was developed by as a nonverbal test of intelligence. Many variants show satisfactory reliability, but performance is correlated both with Verbal IQ and with Performance IQ. Performance is impaired by cerebral lesions but unrelated to the side of lesion.

Students with an undisclosed hearing loss: a challenge for academic access, progress, and success?

It has been suggested that only 8% of postsecondary students in the United States who have a hearing loss have disclosed that hearing loss to their institutions. Consistent with this suggestion, two anonymous surveys of students enrolled in courses with the Open University in the United Kingdom suggested that there were roughly 9,000 students in the Open University itself and over 42,000 students in higher education across the United Kingdom as a whole who had a hearing loss that they had not disclosed to their institutions. These students tended to be older people with a relatively mild hearing loss that did not disrupt their communication with other students or their active engagement with learning activities.

Academic engagement in students with a hearing loss in distance education.

This investigation compared 267 students with a hearing loss and 178 students with no declared form of disability who were taking courses by distance learning in terms of their scores on an abbreviated version of the Academic Engagement Form. Students with a hearing loss obtained lower scores than students with no disability with regard to communication with other students, but some felt that communication was easier than in a traditional academic situation. Students who were postvocationally deaf had lower scores than students with no disability on learning from other students, but they obtained higher scores on student autonomy and student control.

Howard Andrew Knox and the origins of performance testing on Ellis Island, 1912-1916.

Howard Andrew Knox was Assistant Surgeon at the immigration station at Ellis Island, New York, between April 1912 and May 1916. In response to public disquiet that the physicians at Ellis Island were failing to prevent mentally retarded people from entering the country, Knox and his colleagues assembled a collection of performance tests that could be administered to potential immigrants with little knowledge of the English language. They were subsequently used in clinical practice and in educational, psychological, and social research.

A jigsaw-puzzle imagery task for assessing active visuospatial processes in old and young people.

Recent studies have suggested a theoretical distinction between active elaboration and passive storage in visuospatial working memory, but research with older adults has failed to demonstrate a differential preservation of these two abilities. The results are controversial, and the investigation of the active component has been inhibited by the absence of any appropriate experimental procedures. A new task was developed involving the mental reconstruction of pictures of objects from fragmented pieces, and this provides a useful procedure for exploring active visuospatial processing.