'No research is insignificant': implementing a Students-as-Researchers Festival

There are increasing demands for Higher Education (HE) students to play a role in research-active communities and, similarly, for College Based Higher Education (CBHE) lecturers to develop their research practices. A cross-consortium Student Research Festival was designed to create a collaborative 'community of discovery' (Coffield and Williamson, 2011) and enable final year students to disseminate their research studies to a wider audience. The Festival drew on current HE pedagogies to build an open communicative space in which the three dimensions of practice architecture (Kemmis et.al., 2014) were embodied. The Festival was evaluated through a Collaborative Action Research project in order to establish how the sharing of research contributed to the participants' identity as researchers. Data were analysed using the a priori categories afforded by the practice architecture framework. Valuable insights emerged into the students' conception of research, as detached from the 'real' world and belonging to the privileged few. These views were challenged by the experience of the Festival, which narrowed the gap between student and researcher and unsettled existing roles. Recommendations include widening the scope of the Festival to include other stakeholders and embedding further research building opportunities in the undergraduate curriculum

Stress, coping, and adaptation in married couples

This study was undertaken to determine the utility of a proposed model of family stress. For individual family members it was proposed that the level of strain (or subjective stress) in response to an event is related to (a) person variables, including importance of the event, beliefs about internal or external control, anticipated difficulty of the event, and familiarity with the event; (b) situational variables including ambiguity and timing of the event; and (c) accumulation of recent and concurrent stressors. It was also proposed that adaptation to the event depends on the level of strain, the type of coping behaviours utilised, and the extent of the person's coping resources individual, marital, and social. For couples, it was proposed that their mean scores on the predictors and also the discrepancy between their scores on these same predictors affect their mean collective scores on the dependent variables (strain and adaptation). A longitudinal study of 123 couples during the transition to parenthood was undertaken to examine the utility of the proposed model of family stress. When the individual marital partner was considered as the unit of analysis, the distinctive predictors of strain were the importance attributed to the event, its anticipated difficulty, the extent of role ambiguity, and the experience of recent and concurrent stressors. Also, as expected, high levels of strain and emotion-focussed coping emerged as distinctive predictors of poor adaptation. There was, however, little support for the hypothesis that problem-focussed coping facilitates adaptation to new parenthood. The data provided mixed support for the hypothesis that an individual's coping resources would produce a high level of adaptation. This support was largely evident in relation to the individual resources of self-esteem and morale and tended to support the additive model that, irrespective of the level of stress, coping resources have direct effects on well­ being, rather than an interactive effect of buffering the individual against stress. When the couple was considered as the unit of analysis, the data provided general support for the expectation that mean couple scores influence collective scores on the measures of strain and adaptation. These results largely replicated those obtained when the individual was the unit of analysis. But there was little evidence for the effect of discrepancy scores; that is, the levels of strain and adaptation were generally not affected by discrepancies between characteristics of the spouses

‘Hearts and minds’: association, causation and implication of cognitive impairment in heart failure

The clinical syndrome of heart failure is one of the leading causes of hospitalisation and mortality in older adults. An association between cognitive impairment and heart failure is well described but our understanding of the relationship between the two conditions remains limited. In this review we provide a synthesis of available evidence, focussing on epidemiology, the potential pathogenesis, and treatment implications of cognitive decline in heart failure. Most evidence available relates to heart failure with reduced ejection fraction and the syndromes of chronic cognitive decline or dementia. These conditions are only part of a complex heart failure-cognition paradigm. Associations between cognition and heart failure with preserved ejection fraction and between acute delirium and heart failure also seem evident and where data are available we will discuss these syndromes. Many questions remain unanswered regarding heart failure and cognition. Much of the observational evidence on the association is confounded by study design, comorbidity and insensitive cognitive assessment tools. If a causal link exists, there are several potential pathophysiological explanations. Plausible underlying mechanisms relating to cerebral hypoperfusion or occult cerebrovascular disease have been described and it seems likely that these may coexist and exert synergistic effects. Despite the prevalence of the two conditions, when cognitive impairment coexists with heart failure there is no specific guidance on treatment. Institution of evidence-based heart failure therapies that reduce mortality and hospitalisations seems intuitive and there is no signal that these interventions have an adverse effect on cognition. However, cognitive impairment will present a further barrier to the often complex medication self-management that is required in contemporary heart failure treatment

Group size and personalization’s effect on Facebook message response rates

Purpose The bystander effect is one of the most well researched and replicated phenomena in social psychology. It repeatedly shows that the presence of other people inhibits the impulse to help due to the concept of diffusion of responsibility. Recently, researchers have studied this phenomenon online in the context of e-mails, internet chat rooms, and discussion forums. The results provide evidence that the presence of “virtual” others decreases the likelihood of helping behavior. Personalization is another factor that strongly influences helping behavior. Referring to a person by name when soliciting help request increases the likelihood of receiving assistance. Yet, with the most popular activity on the internet now being social media, it would be beneficial to know if diffusion of responsibility and personalization also occurs in this part of the online world. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach To investigate the validity of diffusion of responsibility as well as personalization in a social media context, 176 participants sent out one private Facebook message soliciting help in the form of an online survey to one, three, six, or nine of their Facebook friends. They greeted their friend(s) by name or just said “Hi” or “Hi all.” Findings Responses to the survey provided strong support for personalizing the greeting, but did not support the theory of diffusion of responsibility. Practical implications This study has many practical implications. For one, with social media being used not only by individuals but by businesses and industries, it is important to know the most effective way in eliciting help and responses from individuals. It is also beneficial for researchers as well who are increasingly using social media as a recruitment tool to find participants. This study suggests that personalizing salutations is an effective way of eliciting more responses and raises important research questions about the validity of diffusion of responsibility in online environments. Originality/value This study also has originality and value in that it provides a start for understanding helping behavior in a social media environment as well as applying relevant social psychological theories to online behavior. It highlights the similarities as well as differences between offline and online human behavior as well as highlights the importance of personalization in online requests. </jats:sec

Implications of Natural Categories for Natural Language Generation

Psychological research has shown that natural taxonomies contain a distinguished or basic level. Adult speakers use the names of these categories most frequently and can list a large number of attributes for them. They typically can list many attributes for superordinate categories and list few additional attributes for subordinate categories. Because natural taxonomies are important to human language, their use in natural language processing systems appears well founded. In the past, however, most AI systems have been implemented around uniform taxonomies in which there is no distinguished level. It has recently been demonstrated that natural taxonomies enhance natural language processing systems by allowing selection of appropriate category names and by providing the means to handle implicit focus. We propose that additional benefits from the use of natural categories can be realized in multi-sentential connected text generation systems. After discussing the psychological research on natural taxonomies that relates to natural language processing systems, the use of natural categorizations in current natural language processing systems is presented. We then describe how natural categories can be used in multiple sentence generation systems to allow the selection of appropriate category names, to provide the mechanism to help determine salience to aid in the selection of discourse schema. to provide for the shallow modeling audience expertise, and to increase the efficiency of taxonomy inheritance

What really makes students like a web site? What are the implications for designing web-based language learning sites?

Faced with reduced numbers choosing to study foreign languages (as in England and Wales), strategies to create and maintain student interest need to be explored. One such strategy is to create âtasterâ courses in languages, for potential university applicants. The findings presented arise from exploratory research, undertaken to inform the design of a selection of web-based taster courses for less widely taught languages. 687 school students, aged 14-18, were asked to identify a web site that they liked and to state their main reason for liking it. They were invited to include recreational sites and told that their answers could help with web design for the taster courses. To explore the reasons, two focus groups were conducted and student feedback on the developing taster course site was collected. Students nominated search engines and academic sites, sites dedicated to hobbies, enthusiasms, youth culture and shopping. They liked them for their visual attributes, usability, interactivity, support for schoolwork and for their cultural and heritage associations, as well as their content and functionality. They emerged as sensitive readers of web content, visually aware and with clear views on how text should be presented. These findings informed design of the taster course site. They are broadly in line with existing design guidelines but add to our knowledge about school studentsâ use of the web and about designing web-based learning materials. They may also be relevant to web design at other levels, for example for undergraduates