'There's a place for us'- and our graduates - in the workplace

This article forms part of a special issue of Psychology Teaching Review. The article contributes to a discussion on the future employability of psychology graduates

Supporting the transition from HND Social Sciences into BPS accredited second year psychology degrees

Executive Summary Under the auspices of the Higher Education Academy Psychology Network, and supported by the Scottish Funding Council, a small Colleges/ HEI working group was set up with the objective of investigating any pedagogical objections which could be a barrier to transition for students with a HND in Social Sciences articulating to second year BPS accredited degrees in Psychology. To investigate possible gaps in curriculum between Psychology content in the newly validated HND Social Sciences and that of first year undergraduate in HEIs, a survey of the course content, delivery and assessment methodology of undergraduate Psychology courses were undertaken. The findings were then compared to those in the Psychology component delivered in the newly validated (May 2006) HND Social Sciences. The survey showed that there was a communality of curriculum between the Psychology content of the HND and the first year undergraduate in Scottish HEIs, and that the delivery and assessment methods needed for the successful completion of the HND were comparable. To order to assess the likely consistency of delivery between Scotland’s Colleges and the HEI sector a comparison of the main Quality Assessment procedures were undertaken with the parallel processes in place for colleges by the SQA and HMIE. Information from the following four areas was examined. • • • Provision of SPSS Licence and tutor training across the Scotland’s Colleges Matching of optional topics by Course Leaders in colleges to those widely used in Universities Wide distribution of this report to all interested parties • • • • Resource review Content review Assignments – setting, undertaking and grading Recording processes The exercise showed clearly that there were rigorous Quality Assurance mechanisms in place in colleges which compared well to those present in HEIs. The report concludes that there are no pedagogical barriers to second year entry to Psychology courses for HND Social Science students qualified under the newly validated format. Several recommendations to improve HND/HEI transition into second year Psychology degrees, including; To assist greater transparency and clarity with regard to UCAS applications and admission to HEIs, a number of short advice/recommendation documents to assist students, college tutors and HEI admission officers are attached

How was it for you? A cross-disciplinary study of ‘troublesome knowledge’ as identified by undergraduate students and lecturers in Geography, Medical Science and Psychology

We carried out a small scale pilot study to determine whether participants would spontaneously identify Threshold Concepts (TC’s) and/or troublesome knowledge during open questioning on the characteristics of their disciplines. Students and lecturers reflected upon both easy and difficult aspects of their studies or teaching practice in either group discussions or one-to-one interviews. We compared students and staff observations both within and between the disciplines we examined (Geography, Medical Sciences and Psychology undergraduate degrees). Our intention was to provide specific examples of TC’s within our three disciplines to inform further discussion of embedding the enhancement theme both in our practice and in the learning experiences of our students. Our working hypothesis was that if TC’s exerted an influence on the teaching and learning experience either negatively or otherwise, then we would find ample evidence supplied in our interviews. What we found was that overwhelmingly our interviewees focussed on generic skills-based aspects of teaching and learning. Only three potential content-specific TC’s were offered spontaneously by students and these were all from the discipline of geography

Building better respite: hearing the voice of carers

Elaine Fielding, Elizabeth Beattie, Meredith Gresham, Christine Neville and Margaret Readford report on a study that investigated what carers of people with dementia want and need from respite services

Analysis of Biological Weapon Spread Through a Transportation Network

Biological weapons are one of the top five threats identified by the Department of Defense in the United States. While most people commonly associate weapons of mass destruction only with atomic bombs, biological agents still have the ability to inflict mass casualties and panic. By strategically placing bioweapon detection units, known as BioWatch, in various airports, a disease spread could be detected and mitigated before country wide dispersal of the disease occurs. Key cities to invest this program are investigated through network analysis of flight itineraries with large volumes of traffic. In addition to analyzing an airport network, there is also the possibility that an attack could still succeed and infect a city. Should this occur, the current Center for Disease Control policy is to trace sources of infections and vaccinate people suspected of harboring the disease. Kaplan et al., as well as others, have argued for mass vaccination rather than the trace policy. Kaplan et al.’s model is extended to consider policies to respond to potential outbreak scenarios

Decline and fall:a biological, developmental, and psycholinguistic account of deliberative language processes and ageing

Background: This paper reviews the role of deliberative processes in language: those language processes that require central resources, in contrast to the automatic processes of lexicalisation, word retrieval, and parsing. 10 Aims: We describe types of deliberative processing, and show how these processes underpin high-level processes that feature strongly in language. We focus on metalin- guistic processing, strategic processing, inhibition, and planning. We relate them to frontal-lobe function and the development of the fronto-striate loop. We then focus on the role of deliberative processes in normal and pathological development and ageing, 15 and show how these processes are particularly susceptible to deterioration with age. In particular, many of the commonly observed language impairments encountered in ageing result from a decline in deliberative processing skills rather than in automatic language processes. Main Contribution: We argue that central processing plays a larger and more important 20 role in language processing and acquisition than is often credited. Conclusions: Deliberative language processes permeate language use across the lifespan. They are particularly prone to age-related loss. We conclude by discussing implications for therapy

Some determinants of worker performance: bus drivers in the Scottish Bus Group

This thesis reports the results of a major survey into the determinants of bus driver performance. Over 600 drivers in the Scottish Bus Group were given a battery of three psychological tests: (i) the Ingleton Word Recognition Test, (ii) the IPAT Culture Fair test of "g" and (iii) the Cattell 16PF. Scores on these were factor analysed along with age to give six second-order factors. Over forty measures of work performance were also collected for each driver; these were factor analysed and six factors emerged. Factor scores from the two analyses were correlated and the main dimensions of personality and performance determined. The thesis also presents a review of the history and structure of the British bus industry, and of the role and duties of the bus driver. Methodological issues in the research also receive detailed discussion. The results have already started to be applied in the selection of new drivers by the Scottish Bus Group

Ageing makes us dyslexic

Background: The effects of typical ageing on spoken language are well known: word production is disproportionately affected while syntactic processing is relatively well preserved. Little is known, however, about how ageing affects reading.Aims: What effect does ageing have on written language processing? In particular, how does it affect our ability to read words? How does it affect phonological awareness (our ability to manipulate the sounds of our language)?Methods & Procedures: We tested 14 people with Parkinson's disease (PD), 14 typically ageing adults (TAA), and 14 healthy younger adults on a range of background neuropsychological tests and tests of phonological awareness. We then carried out an oral naming experiment where we manipulated consistency, and a nonword repetition task where we manipulated the word-likeness of the nonwords.Outcomes & Results: We find that normal ageing causes individuals to become mildly phonologically dyslexic in that people have difficulty pronouncing nonwords. People with Parkinson's disease perform particularly poorly on language tasks involving oral naming and metalinguistic processing. We also find that ageing causes difficulty in repeating nonwords. We show that these problems are associated with a more general difficulty in processing phonological information, supporting the idea that language difficulties, including poorer reading in older age, can result from a general phonological deficit.Conclusions: We suggest that neurally this age-induced dyslexia is associated with frontal deterioration (and perhaps deterioration in other regions) and cognitively to the loss of executive processes that enable us to manipulate spoken and written language. We discuss implications for therapy and treatment

Mishandled: Turnhill University’s Approach to Sexual Violence

Sexual violence on college and university campuses in Canada and the United States has been an unsettling issue for several decades. However, the understanding that politicians, policy makers, and academic administrations can no longer ignore these violations is a more recent development. This thesis investigates the management and the potential mismanagement of sexual violence policy and practice with a specific focus on one Canadian University in Southern Ontario. Intersectional feminist theory provided the conceptual framework informing this research and institutional ethnography was the methodology engaged to explore a range of university policy and practices. This research illuminates the difficulties that policy makers and students identified in the development of accessible sexual violence policies and practices and provides recommendations to help post-secondary institutions implement sexual violence policies and protocols that are more useful for students and more socially just

The structure of recall in amnesia

This thesis reports seven experiments on the nature of the functional deficit in amnesia. Experiments 1 to 3 investigate patterns of recall for amnesic subjects and matched controls to investigate a hypothesised specific deficit in recall in amnesia. No significant evidence of a recall deficit in amnesia was found. However, a difference emerged between the two groups in the analyses of the stochastic relationship between recall and recognition. This revealed that in amnesic subjects recall is approximately independent of recognition, whereas in control subjects they are positively related. The second three experiments investigated a hypothesised selective deficit of spatial memory by comparing amnesic and control memory for the locations of objects or words placed on a grid. The hypothesis that intentional encoding of locations would improve amnesic spatial memory scores resulting in a trade-off of recall and recognition of the item's identities was also examined. No significant evidence of a selective spatial memory deficit in amnesia was found, nor did intentional instructions improve amnesic spatial memory scores. There was no significant evidence of a trade-off of item and location memory in the amnesic group. A further analysis comparing control and amnesic memory for the location of items scored by lenient criteria found no significant difference between the amnesic and control scores for number of items of this type, or for recall and recognition memory of these items. Fragment and schema models have been applied to normal memory for this type of contextual material. In a final experiment, the predictions of both types of model were contrasted with each other for data on singly and multiply cued recall provided by both normal and amnesic subjects. It was found that amnesics and normal controls formed fragments representing the unrelated triads and schemas representing the related triads. Both the schema and the fragment model parameters displayed uniform patterns of impairment. Thus amnesic memory may be argued to differ from normal memory quantitatively, rather than qualitatively. The implications of these findings for theories of memory and processing in amnesia are discussed