Spirituality, Religion, and Pursuing Purpose: Connecting African American Males’ Educational Pursuits to a Higher Power

As Black men continually face challenges while seeking to graduate from college, researchers and educational leaders have continuously sought ways to understand and remedy the issues. Spirituality and religion have been found to have positive influences on Black students’ success in college. This study was designed to explore the role of spirituality and religion in the lives of Black men at a large research-oriented institution in Texas. The article examines how spirituality and religion among Black undergraduate men influenced their ability to persist. Interviews were conducted with 10 Black undergraduate men who identified as being spiritual and/or religious. The findings suggest that seeking and understanding purpose from a higher being positively influences persistence for Black undergraduate men

Prayer, purpose in life, and attitudes toward substances: a study among 13- to 15-year-olds in England and Wales

This study set out to examine the association between prayer frequency, purpose in life and attitude toward substances, among a sample of 2,563 13- to 15-year-old secondary school pupils in England and Wales. Multivariate models controlling for sex, school year and personality (as defined by the Eysenkian dimensional model) demonstrated that higher levels of purpose in life are associated with greater prayer frequency, and that more proscriptive attitudes toward substances are associated with both higher levels of purpose in life and greater prayer frequency. These findings are consistent with a model suggesting that prayer frequency promotes a more negative view of substances both directly and indirectly through cultivating a greater sense of purpose in life

For Our Future: the 21st Century Higher Education Strategy and Plan for Wales

"The document is a new higher education strategy and plan for Wales. It builds upon and replaces Reaching Higher. The plan provides a response to the Jones Review of Higher Education in Wales which looked at the mission, purpose, role and funding of higher education in Wales. The strategy and plan will set out the strategic direction for HE, and the commitment to ensuring its contribution to social justice, lifelong learning and a buoyant economy.

Rethinking higher education and its relationship with social inequalities: Past knowledge, present state and future potential

The purposes and impact of higher education on the economy and the broader society have been transformed through time in various ways. Higher education institutional and policy dynamics differ across time, but also between countries and political regimes and therefore context cannot be neglected. This article reviews the purpose of higher education and its institutional characteristics juxtaposing two, allegedly rival, conceptual frameworks; the instrumental and the intrinsic one. Various pedagogical traditions are critically reviewed and used as examples, which can potentially inform today’s policy making. Since, higher education cannot be seen as detached from all other lower levels of education appropriate conceptual links are offered throughout this article. Its significance lies on the organic synthesis of literature across social science, suggesting ways of going forward based on the traditions that already exist but seem underutilized so far because of overdependence in market-driven practices. This offers a new insight on how theories can inform policy making, through conceptual “bridging” and reconciliation. The debate on the purpose of higher education is placed under the context of the most recent developments of increasing social inequalities in the western world and its relation to the mass model of higher education and the relevant policy decisions for a continuous increase in participation. This article suggests that the current policy focus on labor market driven policies in higher education have led to an ever growing competition transforming this social institution to an ordinary market-place, where attainment and degrees are seen as a currency that can be converted to a labour market value. Education has become an instrument for economic progress moving away from its original role to provide context for human development. As a result, higher education becomes very expensive and even if policies are directed towards openness, in practice, just a few have the money to afford it. A shift toward a hybrid model, where the intrinsic purpose of higher education is equally acknowledged along with its instrumental purpose should be seen by policy makers as the way forward to create educational systems that are more inclusive and societies that are more knowledgeable and just

On n-Hom-Leibniz algebras and cohomology

The purpose of this paper is to provide a cohomology of $n$-Hom-Leibniz algebras. Moreover, we study some higher operations on cohomology spaces and deformations

Primordial nucleosynthesis in higher dimensional cosmology

We investigate nucleosynthesis and element formation in the early universe in the framework of higher dimensional cosmology. For this purpose we utilize a previous solution of the present author, which may be termed as the generalized Friedmann-Robertson-Walker model. We find that temperature decays less rapidly in higher dimensional cosmology, which we believe may have nontrivial consequences \emph{vis-a-vis} primordial physics