Quality and inequality in undergraduate courses: a guide for national and institutional policy makers

Summary of Main Findings ‘The Pedagogic Quality and Inequality in University First Degrees Project’ was a longitudinal investigation of sociology and related social science degree courses in four universities . Its main objectives were to investigate what social science students value about their university education and differences in curriculum and teaching in different universities. The main findings are summarised below and relate to defining, improving and measuring the quality of undergraduate courses. Defining good quality undergraduate courses • High quality undergraduate courses are those in which students engage with academic knowledge in transformative ways. Courses in different disciplines are likely to be transformative in different ways. • In sociology-related social sciences, academic engagement is transformative in three ways: students gain access to an understanding of academic knowledge that is interesting and relevant to their lives; it changes the way that they understand themselves and their place in the world; and they gain an enhanced understanding of society. Such outcomes emphasise the importance of maintaining sociology-related social science courses across the sector. • Good teaching is vital if students are to engage with academic knowledge in transformative ways. Improving the quality of undergraduate courses • Improving teaching is central to improving the quality of undergraduate courses. • Good teaching is multidimensional and improving it is timeconsuming and challenging. • A focus on quality enhancement that supports lecturers is in danger of being obscured by the emphasis in recent policy documents on improving quality through competition. Measuring the quality of undergraduate courses • Key measures of the quality of undergraduate courses are students’ engagement with academic knowledge and good teaching. • When quality is measured by engagement with academic knowledge, the ranking of the universities in the study is very different from that in national higher education league tables. • Without engaging meaningfully in academic knowledge, students are unlikely to gain much benefit from studying an undergraduate degree. So in order to be valid measures of the quality of undergraduate courses, national higher education league tables, Key Information Sets and the National Student Survey need to take account of students’ engagement with academic knowledge

Sociological approaches to the sexed running body and its construction through magazine and memory 1979-1995

This thesis explores the transforming embodiment of sex that is integral to the development of running/jogging culture between 1979-1995. Actor-network theory, a foucauldian approach and critical realism are each used to elucidate different aspects of running including the way it defines sex through the body, clothing, space and the rules and practices of running, jogging and racing

Rituals of gothic recreation: an analysis of the personal and social significance of Whitby Gothic Weekend

This paper was published in a book of conference proceedings from the 22nd International Oral History Association Conference. It explored the significance of attending and participating in Whitby Gothic festival. It draws upon Vicor Turner's analysis of status reversal to argue that the festival is a form of renewal and that the event symbolises a set of idealised goth values

Convergent policies and differentiated contexts: developing an understanding of employability through the disciplinary lenses of students and academics in taught STEM postgraduate programmes

This paper explores the way that the notion of employability is articulated in interviews and focus groups with academic staff and students on five postgraduate taught (PGT) Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Masters courses as well as in curricula documents. The authors draw upon the notion of a specialised disciplinary identity, which is based upon previous work by McLean et al (2013) and the concepts that Bernstein (2000) associated with pedagogic identity and knowledge structures to gain insight into how STEM disciplines interact with students’ biographies and specific local educational and employment contexts to create more nuanced and differentiated understandings of employability than that which is presented in policy

Blockchain Wallets in Health care systems

The whole concept of Blockchain is fascinating, no doubt. However, there is a catch here. As cryptocurrencies are becoming the order of the day in financial markets, a lot of patience goes into understanding and managing them. We know that cryptocurrencies are digital money, so where do we store them? The answer to this question is Blockchain Wallets. We classify, and compare the advantages and disad-vantages of various routing protocols. We also address Emergency health issues and suggest how it can be improved

Editorial Introduction to a Collection from the 2003 BSA Conference 'Social Futures: Desire, Excess and Waste' the Consumption and Waste Stream

Review of: Williams, Karel, Colin Haslam, Sukhdev Johal and John Williams (1994) Cars. New York: Bergbahn Books.Book Review

Representations of a high-quality system of undergraduate education in English higher education policy documents

This article examines the ways in which a high-quality system of undergraduate education is represented in recent policy documents from a range of actors interested in higher education. Drawing on Basil Bernstein's ideas, the authors conceptualise the policy documents as reflecting a struggle over competing views of quality that are expressed through pedagogic discourses. They identify two pedagogic discourses: a dominant market-oriented generic discourse and an alternative discourse that focuses on transformation. They argue that the market-oriented generic discourse is dominant because it is more coherent and more consistently presented than the alternative discourse, which is much more fractured. In conclusion, they argue that refocusing the alternative discourse of quality around students' relations to academic knowledge may offer a way in which to bring the different actors from the higher education field together in order to form a stronger, more cohesive voice

How does completing a dissertation transform undergraduate students’ understandings of disciplinary knowledge?

Dissertations are positioned as the capstone of an undergraduate degree, bringing together what students have previously learned from their programmes through a piece of independent research. However, there is limited research into the ways in which engaging in a dissertation impacts on students’ understandings of disciplinary knowledge. In this article, we explore the relations between students’ accounts of sociological knowledge in their second and third year and how they engage with sociological knowledge in their dissertations. We argue that for the work of the dissertation to impact on students’ understanding of sociological knowledge, students need to see their discipline as providing a way of answering their research questions. We explore the implications of this argument for both our understanding of the role of dissertations and research-based learning in universities more generally