Jennifer Welsh

The Mature Student.

The popular stereotype of the university student is a young person. But a minority of students are older men and women who have come to university after a period of employment and not direct from school. Possibly the proportion of mature students may increase in the years ahead, and one university, the Open University, caters especially for these older students. In our studies of success and failure in Aberdeen University over the past eight years, we have tended to exclude the mature students from the analyses, to make a homogeneous sample from a population defined as students coming straight from school to university. The problems of a mature student, coming to university after an interval away from study, may be different from those of the youth fresh from school. There is a popular stereotype of the mature student: oldish (anyone over 30 is old), a late developer who missed his chance by leaving school early or failing his eleven plus, seldom a high‐flier, rather pedestrian and dull, conscientious, se...

Improving the supervision of postgraduate students

In recent years various attempts have been made to identify the factors which underlie postgraduate student dissatisfaction with the supervision they receive. Despite this, few authors have proposed ways in which supervision might be improved. This paper sets out to do so. First, a selection from the literature on causes of dissatisfaction with supervision is briefly reviewed. Second, two suggestions for improvement are presented, based on research findings and on the results of a longitudinal study of research students at one university.

The PhD student at work

ABSTRACT The most common patterns of work activity adopted by Science students during the three years of PhD study are described and their relationship to thesis submission examined. The results suggest that the organisation of PhD study, at least in Science, is an important feature of success, defined in terms of submission of a thesis.

Reading Standards in Aberdeen 1962‐72

Summary The 1962 reading survey in Aberdeen was repeated in 1972, with 99 per cent coverage of year‐groups (over 2,500) of 8‐year old and 11‐year‐old pupils: Reading comprehension tests used were NFER Sentence Reading Test AD and Test NS6. The 1972 averages on these tests were within one point of score of the 1962 averages: at age eight, the average was slightly but not significantly higher in 1972; at age 11, it was slightly and significantly lower. The children whose fathers were in semi‐skilled or unskilled jobs showed a particularly sharp decline in average performance over the ten‐year interval, whereas the standard of performance had improved or been maintained among children from professional homes.