John T. E. Richardson

Instruments for obtaining student feedback: a review of the literature

This paper reviews the research evidence concerning the use of formal instruments to measure students’ evaluations of their teachers, students’ satisfaction with their programmes and students’ perceptions of the quality of their programmes. These questionnaires can provide important evidence for assessing the quality of teaching, for supporting attempts to improve the quality of teaching and for informing prospective students about the quality of course units and programmes. The paper concludes by discussing several issues affecting the practical utility of the instruments that can be used to obtain student feedback. Many students and teachers believe that student feedback is useful and informative, but for a number of reasons many teachers and institutions do not take student feedback sufficiently seriously.

Cognition and Olfaction: A Review

Examines research in cognitive psychology, which has in the past paid little attention to the olfactory modality. But there is now a significant body of literature on the role of the olfactory system in memory and cognition. Human beings possess an excellent ability to detect and discriminate odors, but they typically have great difficulty in identifying particular odorants. This results partly from the use of an improverished and idiosyncratic language to describe olfactory experiences, which are normally encoded either in a rudimentary sensory form or as part of a complex but highly specific biographical episode. Consequently, linguistic processes play only a very limited role in olfactory processing, whereas hedonic factors seem to be of considerable importance.

Mature students in higher education: II. An investigation of approaches to studying and academic performance

ABSTRACT Mature students are often said to be deficient in study skills, but a recent literature review by Richardson concluded that they tended to exhibit more desirable approaches to learning. Using a shortened form of the Approaches to Studying Inventory, a comparison between 38 mature and 60 non-mature students taking the same course found indeed that the mature students obtained significantly higher scores on meaning orientation, and that they also tended to produce lower scores on reproducing orientation. In addition, in terms of both their persistence and their attainment, the subsequent academic performance of the mature students on their degree courses was at least as good as that of the non-mature students.

Mature Students in Higher Education: I. A Literature Survey on Approaches to Studying.

ABSTRACT Although mature students are often said to be deficient in study skills, most research into approaches to studying in higher education has ignored age as an important explanatory variable. There is nevertheless a consistent suggestion in research using inventories and questionnaires on study processes that mature students exhibit more desirable approaches to academic learning. In particular, mature students seem to be more likely than younger students to adopt a deep approach or a meaning orientation, and conversely they seem to be less likely to adopt a surface approach or a reproducing orientation towards their academic work. Three explanations for this are: that mature students are more motivated by intrinsic goals; that younger students acquire a surface approach to learning in the final years of secondary education; and that the prior life experience of mature students promotes a deep approach towards studying in higher education.

Students’ Approaches to Learning and Teachers’ Approaches to Teaching in Higher Education

Research into learning and teaching in higher education over the last 25 years has provided a variety of concepts, methods, and findings that are of both theoretical interest and practical relevance. It has revealed the relationships between students’ approaches to studying, their conceptions of learning, and their perceptions of their academic context. It has revealed the relationships between teachers’ approaches to teaching, their conceptions of teaching, and their perceptions of the teaching environment. And it has provided a range of tools that can be exploited for developing our understanding of learning and teaching in particular contexts and for assessing and enhancing the student experience on specific courses and programs.

Reliability and replicability of the Approaches to Studying Questionnaire

ABSTRACT The Approaches to Studying Questionnaire (ASQ) was devised to measure individual differences in terms of four major study orientations. It achieves satisfactory levels of reliability and the distinction between a meaning orientation and a reproducing orientation has been consistently demonstrated across a variety of student groups. However, the validity of the remaining study orientations and of the constituent subscales is open to question. A shorm form of the ASQ is described, based upon the eight subscales that have been consistently identified with meaning orientation and reproducing orientation. The reliability and replicability of this new questionnaire are considered in the light of a critical evaluation of the analytic methods employed in previous research. Satisfactory levels of internal consistency and test-retest reliability are demonstrated, and factor analysis successfully retrieves the two primary study orientations. While the validity of its constituent subscales is still rather un...

Adult Students in Higher Education: Burden or Boon?

This article disputes the common stereotype that adult students are less effective and less successful as students simply because they are adults. There is no evidence that they lack the skills for effective study, experience learning difficulties because of age-related impairment in their intellectual capabilities, or perform academically less well than younger students.

Articulatory rehearsal and phonological storage in working memory

The theoretical distinction between an articulatory control process and a short-term phonological store was supported in five experiments on immediate serial recall. In Experiment 1, articulatory suppression during the presentation and recall of auditory material abolished the word length effect but not the phonemic similarity effect. In Experiment 2, the two latter effects were found to be independent with auditory presentation. In Experiment 3, the effects of irrelevant speech and word length were found to be independent with visual presentation. In Experiment 4, articulatory suppression during the presentation and recall of auditory material abolished the phonemic similarity effect with a slow presentation rate. Nevertheless, in Experiment 5, articulatory suppression with a conventional presentation rate did not reduce the effect of phonemic similarity, even when a 10-sec interval was interposed between presentation and recall. These results indicate that the encoding, maintenance, and retrieval of spoken material within the phonological store do not depend on a process of articulatory rehearsal.

Gender differences in human cognition

This new volume in the Counterpoints series not only summarizes and addresses the validity (or invalidity) of research into gender differences, it also questions the ideology behind this research, and its consequences.

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, Knoxs (1913) cube imitation test and Corsis (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. Contrary to the earliest writings on the subject, measures of short-term memory do not provide a simple measure of mental capacity, but they do provide a way of understanding some of the key mechanisms underlying human cognition.