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Biomedical subjects

John T E Richardson

Publications and source records attributed to John T E Richardson.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Investigating the relationship between variations in students' perceptions of their academic environment and variations in study behaviour in distance education.

BACKGROUND: Recent research on student learning in higher education has identified clear associations between variations in students' perceptions of their academic environment and variations in their study behaviour. AIMS: This research investigated a general theoretical model linking students' demographic characteristics, perceptions and study behaviour with measures of outcome and in particular compared four accounts of the casual relationship between perceptions and study behaviour. SAMPLES: Study 1 employed data from 1,123 students taking six courses by distance learning; Study 2 employed data from 2,049 students taking seven courses by distance learning. METHODS: Path analysis was used to assess the causal relationships among the students' age, gender and prior qualifications, their scores on the Course Experience Questionnaire, their scores on a short version of the Approaches to Studying Inventory or the Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory, their overall marks and their ratings of general satisfaction. RESULTS: Both studies yielded evidence for the causal efficacy of all the paths identified in the general theoretical model. CONCLUSIONS: There exists a bi-directional causal relationship between variations in students' perceptions of their academic environment and variations in their study behaviour.

Achievement↗
PubMed2005

Knox's cube imitation test: a historical review and an experimental analysis.

The cube imitation test was developed by as a nonverbal test of intelligence. Many variants show satisfactory reliability, but performance is correlated both with Verbal IQ and with Performance IQ. Performance is impaired by cerebral lesions but unrelated to the side of lesion. Examinees describe both verbal and visuospatial strategies. In a new experiment, performance was disrupted by concurrent random generation, manual tapping, and articulatory suppression. The cube imitation test is not simply a measure of the ability to retain visuospatial information but also depends on verbal representations as well as attentional capacity. Even so, the test was central to the modern appreciation that any adequate measure of intelligence must incorporate both verbal tests and performance tests.

History, 20th Century↗
PubMed2005

Perceived academic quality and approaches to studying at Danish schools of occupational therapy.

Students in the fourth semester of basic training programmes in occupational therapy at seven different institutions of higher education in Denmark were surveyed using the Course Experience Questionnaire [CEQ] and the Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory [RASI]. The CEQ proved to be a reasonably robust in this setting: most of the scales demonstrated satisfactory reliability, and a factor analysis confirmed its intended constituent structure. The CEQ also discriminated among students at the seven institutions in their patterns of scores. The RASI proved to be less satisfactory: many subscales did not demonstrate satisfactory reliability and its intended constituent structure was only partly confirmed by factor analysis. Moreover, the RASI failed to discriminate clearly among students at the seven institutions. The scores on the CEQ produced by students at four of the institutions raised concerns relating to the clarity of academic goals and standards, the teaching performance of staff, and the academic workload imposed on students. Nevertheless, students at five institutions produced relatively high ratings of their general satisfaction with their programmes, and students at all seven schools produced high ratings of the appropriateness of their assessments and the acquisition of generic skills.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Academic engagement in students with a hearing loss in distance education.

This investigation compared 267 students with a hearing loss and 178 students with no declared form of disability who were taking courses by distance learning in terms of their scores on an abbreviated version of the Academic Engagement Form. Students with a hearing loss obtained lower scores than students with no disability with regard to communication with other students, but some felt that communication was easier than in a traditional academic situation. Students who were postvocationally deaf had lower scores than students with no disability on learning from other students, but they obtained higher scores on student autonomy and student control. In general, the impact of a hearing loss on engagement in distance education is relatively slight.

Achievement↗
PubMed2004

Students with an undisclosed hearing loss: a challenge for academic access, progress, and success?

It has been suggested that only 8% of postsecondary students in the United States who have a hearing loss have disclosed that hearing loss to their institutions. Consistent with this suggestion, two anonymous surveys of students enrolled in courses with the Open University in the United Kingdom suggested that there were roughly 9,000 students in the Open University itself and over 42,000 students in higher education across the United Kingdom as a whole who had a hearing loss that they had not disclosed to their institutions. These students tended to be older people with a relatively mild hearing loss that did not disrupt their communication with other students or their active engagement with learning activities. The impact of the students' hearing loss upon their approaches to studying seemed to be relatively slight, but it was associated with an increase in the students' perceived academic workload.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2003

Howard Andrew Knox and the origins of performance testing on Ellis Island, 1912-1916.

Howard Andrew Knox was Assistant Surgeon at the immigration station at Ellis Island, New York, between April 1912 and May 1916. In response to public disquiet that the physicians at Ellis Island were failing to prevent mentally retarded people from entering the country, Knox and his colleagues assembled a collection of performance tests that could be administered to potential immigrants with little knowledge of the English language. They were subsequently used in clinical practice and in educational, psychological, and social research. Because of the early work done at Ellis Island, it is nowadays taken for granted that any adequate measure of intelligence must include both verbal and performance subtests.

Emigration and Immigration↗
PubMed2002

A jigsaw-puzzle imagery task for assessing active visuospatial processes in old and young people.

Recent studies have suggested a theoretical distinction between active elaboration and passive storage in visuospatial working memory, but research with older adults has failed to demonstrate a differential preservation of these two abilities. The results are controversial, and the investigation of the active component has been inhibited by the absence of any appropriate experimental procedures. A new task was developed involving the mental reconstruction of pictures of objects from fragmented pieces, and this provides a useful procedure for exploring active visuospatial processing. Significant differences in terms of both correctness and response latency were obtained between young and older adults and between younger old and older old adults. Performance also varied with visual complexity, mental rotation, and processing load. It is concluded that this ecologically relevant procedure constitutes a very powerful, sensitive, and reliable tool for identifying individual differences in visuospatial working memory.

Adult↗