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

Intermittent non-axial dipolar-field dominance of twin Laschamp excursions

Geomagnetic excursions represent the dynamic nature of the geodynamo. Accumulated palaeomagnetic records indicate that such excursions are dominated by dipolar-fields, but exhibit different structures. Here we report a palaeomagnetic record from the varved sediments of Lake Suigetsu, central Japan, which reveals fine structures in the Laschamp Excursion and a new post-Laschamp excursion that coincides with the Δ14C maxima. The record’s high-resolution chronology provides IntCal20 mid-ages and varve-counted durations. Both excursions comprise multiple subcentennial directional-swings. Simulations of filtering effects on sediment-magnetisations demonstrate that this high-resolution record replicates most of the features in existing, lower-resolution Laschamp excursion records, including the apparent clockwise open-loop of the virtual geomagnetic pole pass. The virtual geomagnetic poles during the ‘swing’ phases make four clusters centred in hemispherically-symmetric regions, three of which encompass the virtual geomagnetic poles associated with the Laschamp Excursion recorded in lavas at various locations. The stationary dipolar-field sources under each cluster should have intermittently dominated one after another during the excursions

Economic Credit in Renaissance Florence

What were the social and institutional factors that led to, and reinforced, the precocious emergence of Florentine commercial capitalism,3 especially in the domain of international merchant-banking? The dominant stream of answers, emphasized by economic historians and by economists, focuses on the invention in late-medieval and Renaissance Italy of a variety of innovative business techniques – bills of exchange, double-entry bookkeeping, partnership contracts, commercial courts. If these impressive organizational inventions are interpreted as facets of a broader rise of impersonal market rationality, then a tension emerges in Florentine, and indeed in European, historiography between economic historians and the work of social and political historians, who emphasize the deeply personalistic – mainly familial and clientelist – character of social relationships of the period. But were early-capitalist business techniques really the leading edge of a breakthrough of the market from its traditional social shackles, as the master narrative of modernization would have it? Or instead were economic relations in the market embedded in, and hence reflective of, trends in the surrounding social and political networks of the time, as anthropologically and sociologically oriented economic historians like Karl Polanyi4 have argued? Renaissance Florentine businessmen were not only businessmen, after all, they were also fathers, neighbors, politicians, friends and enemies, and patrons of the arts. But what implications, if any, did this overlap in roles have for the organization and operation of economic markets? In this article, we address these historical questions through both statistical and textual analyses of Florentine commercial credit in the early Quattrocento. Our conclusion will be that commercial credits among Florentine companies were indeed highly correlated with a wide range of non-economic, social relationships among the partners of these companies. Correlations between economic and social relations were highest in the merchant-banking pinnacle of the Florentine economy – precisely in the industries where reliance upon advanced capitalist business techniques was greatest. New capitalist business techniques thus did not displace the oligarchic social networks of the time, but rather built upon and formalized these relationships into markets. In particular, family and neighborhood provided strong ‘traditionalist’ foundations to Renaissance Florentine credit markets. But then republicanism, especially in the institutional form of its elected city council, provided the political scaffolding for personalistic social networks (and thus the economic credit networks built upon them) topologically to ‘open out’ toward expansive liquidity and growth, instead of to close inward into cliques and corruption. Three mechanisms for this institutional impact of republicanism on the emergence of credit markets are discussed: public certification of reputation (onore) through co-optative elections, and both performative and network incorporations of carefully filtered newcomers into relatively open elites5 of merchant-politicians

Energy Audit of a Fitness/Leisure Centre

This paper aims to investigate the energy performance of a fitness/leisure centre. A detailed energy audit has been conducted to determine the energy consumption of the building. Through the collection and analysis of data, the energy performance and Energy Performance Indicators (EnPIs) have been identified. This research indicates that an energy audit can lead to identifying significant energy savings potential in a building. Energy saving opportunities have been identified with a potential to save 158,906kWh of electricity, 81,201kg of CO2 and potentially saving up to e51,230 per annum. A combined heat and power (CHP) plant could yield savings of up to e28,522 annually. A lighting upgrade offers potential savings of 122,976kWh of electricity and e19,373 annually. Due to their high energy demand, commercial buildings have the potential for significant energy savings. The fitness centre was built in 2004 to a high standard and is a well maintained building. Nevertheless, this paper demonstrates the significant potential for energy reduction in buildings such as fitness centres

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

The influence of curricula content on English sociology students' transformations:the case of feminist knowledge

Previous research identifies the importance of feminist knowledgefor improving gender equity, economic prosperity and socialjustice for all. However, there are difficulties in embeddingfeminist knowledge in higher education curricula. Across England,undergraduate sociology is a key site for acquiring feministknowledge. In a study of four English sociology departments, BasilBernstein’s theoretical concepts and Madeleine Arnot’s notion ofgender codes frame an analysis indicating that sociology curriculain which feminist knowledge is strongly classified in separatemodules is associated with more women being personallytransformed. Men’s engagement with feminist knowledge is lowand it does not become more transformative when knowledge isstrongly classified. Curriculum, pedagogy and gender codes are allpossible contributors to these different relationships with feministknowledge across the sample of 98 students