Papers by John S Richardson
The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2014
Increasingly, universities are embedding reflective activities into the curriculum. With the grow... more Increasingly, universities are embedding reflective activities into the curriculum. With the growth in online tertiary education, how effectively is reflection being promoted or used in online learning spaces? Based on the notion that teachers' beliefs will influence their approaches to teaching, this research sought to understand how a group of distance tutors at the UK Open University conceptualised reflection. It was hoped that these findings would illuminate their approaches to promoting reflection as part of their online pedagogies. Phenomenographic analysis indicated that these tutors conceptualised reflection in four qualitatively different ways. Furthermore, the data suggested that these educators held a combination of two conceptions: one that understood the origin of being reflective and one that understood the purpose of reflection. Analysis of structural aspects of these conceptions offered insight into tutors'
American Journal of Psychiatry, 2016
Although disasters are a major cause of mental health problems and typically affect large numbers... more Although disasters are a major cause of mental health problems and typically affect large numbers of people and communities, little is known about how social structures affect mental health after a disaster. The authors assessed the extent to which mental health outcomes after disaster are associated with social network structures. In a community-based cohort study of survivors of a major bushfire disaster, participants (N=558) were assessed for probable posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and probable depression. Social networks were assessed by asking participants to nominate people with whom they felt personally close. These nominations were used to construct a social network map that showed each participant's ties to other participants they nominated and also to other participants who nominated them. This map was then analyzed for prevailing patterns of mental health outcomes. Depression risk was higher for participants who reported fewer social connections, were connected to other depressed people, or were connected to people who had left their community. PTSD risk was higher if fewer people reported being connected with the participant, if those who felt close to the participant had higher levels of property loss, or if the participant was linked to others who were themselves not interconnected. Interestingly, being connected to other people who in turn were reciprocally close to each other was associated with a lower risk of PTSD. These findings provide the first evidence of disorder-specific patterns in relation to one's social connections after disaster. Depression appears to co-occur in linked individuals, whereas PTSD risk is increased with social fragmentation. These patterns underscore the need to adopt a sociocentric perspective of postdisaster mental health in order to better understand the potential for societal interventions in the wake of disaster.
American Neptune Salem Ma, 1980
ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the use of a natural language analytics engine to provide feedback... more ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the use of a natural language analytics engine to provide feedback to students when preparing an essay for summative assessment. OpenEssayist is a real-time learning analytics tool, which operates through the combination of a linguistic analysis engine that processes the text in the essay, and a web application that uses the output of the linguistic analysis engine to generate the feedback. We outline the system itself and present analysis of observed patterns of activity as a cohort of students engaged with the system for their module assignments. We report a significant positive correlation between the number of drafts submitted to the system and the grades awarded for the first assignment. We can also report that this cohort of students gained significantly higher overall grades than the students in the previous cohort, who had no access to OpenEssayist. As a system that is content free, OpenEssayist can be used to support students working in any domain that requires the writing of essays.
This paper reports the findings of an empirical investigation, which set out to test a set of rai... more This paper reports the findings of an empirical investigation, which set out to test a set of rainbow essay exercises. The rainbow diagrams are pictorial representations of formal graphs that are derived automatically from student essays. They were designed to allow students to discover how key concepts in a well written essay are connected together. The students would then be able to compare a rainbow diagram of their own essay with a good essay and make changes to it before submission to their tutor. However a trail was undertaken with academics, teaching and learning staff, doctoral students at the Open University of Catalonia and the Open University UK, before implementation into the web application known as Open Essayist. All the participants from each University completed the exercise correctly. This was a surprising finding as we expected participants to experience some difficulties, as previous visual representations we piloted. All the participants remarked that they had learnt a lot about the structure of good essays and more importantly how clear the role of the conclusion played in a well-constructed essay. This type of representation made this explicit and they would be able to see quickly if a second draft had improved. The users also mentioned that the rainbow diagram representations could be used as a generic essay feedback tool. It could be used across subject domains, a hypothesis worthy of further investigation.
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Perceptual and Motor Skills, Apr 1, 1994
Two experiments were carried out to compare the performance of male and female students at differ... more Two experiments were carried out to compare the performance of male and female students at different educational levels on tasks that required mental rotation. Exp. 1 also compared their performance on an overt, male-typed version and a disguised, female-typed version of the same task. Amongst introductory undergraduate students, men performed significantly better than women, but this difference was as pronounced on the disguised, female-typed version as on the overt, male-typed task. However, there was no sign of any gender difference on the overt task in advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students. The latter finding was not replicated in Exp. 2, in which significant effects of gender regardless of the students' educational level were noted. Nevertheless, the effect size was significantly smaller than that obtained for comparable students tested on the same task during the 1970s. Taken together, these results confirm that gender differences in at least some aspects of mental rotation may be abolished by educational experience and that gender differences in mental rotation have become smaller over the last 20 years. Such findings favor sociocultural explanations of gender differences in mental rotation rather than biological explanations.
The British Journal of General Practice the Journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners, Nov 1, 2003
Sexual violence against women is common. The prevalence appears to be higher in north America tha... more Sexual violence against women is common. The prevalence appears to be higher in north America than Europe. However, not all surveys have differentiated the experience of forced sex by a current or former partner. Few women are thought to report these experiences to their general practitioner (GP). To measure the prevalence of rape, sexual assault, and forced sexual intercourse by a partner among women attending general practices, to test the association between these experiences of sexual violence and demographic factors, and to assess the acceptability to women of screening for sexual violence by GPs. Cross-sectional survey. A self-administered questionnaire survey of 1207 women aged over 15 years was carried out in 13 general practices in Hackney, east London. Eight per cent (95% confidence interval [CI] = 6.2 to 9.6) of women have experienced rape, 9% (95% CI = 7.0 to 10.6) another type of sexual assault, and 16% (95% CI = 13.6 to 18.1) forced sex by a partner in adulthood: 24% (95% CI = 21.2 to 26.5) have experienced one or more of these types of sexual violence. Experiences of sexual violence demonstrated high levels of lifetime co-occurrence. Women forced to have sex by partners experienced the most severe forms of domestic violence. One in five women would object to routine questioning about being raped and/or sexually assaulted, and one in nine about being forced to have sex by a partner. Experiences of sexual violence are common in the lives of adult women in east London, and they represent a significant public health problem. Those women who have one experience appear to be at risk of being victims again. A substantial minority object to routine questions about sexual violence.
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This proceedings contains session topics: extension systems, extension programs, extension evalua... more This proceedings contains session topics: extension systems, extension programs, extension evaluation, program impacts, extension management, extension reform, experiential learning, program delivery, farming systems research, professional training and development, program strategies, teaching effectiveness, organizational leadership, extension programming, extension models and extension program evaluation. (CCM) The membership of AIAEE wishes to express their appreciation to those who served as referees for the paper summaries submitted for the 1999 Annual Conference. Each of the paper summaries was judged and scored by a minimum of three peer reviewers. More than sixty-five papers and fourteen posters were accepted for inclusion in this publication.
Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, 2006
A mailed survey compared the experiences of distance-learning students with print disabilities wh... more A mailed survey compared the experiences of distance-learning students with print disabilities who were supported by audio recordings of materials, the experiences of students with print disabilities who were supported by an electronic system that permitted more effective access to the same materials, and the experiences of students with no disability. Findings showed that the students with print disabilities rated their courses less favorably and were more likely to adopt a surface approach to studying than were students with no disability. However, the students with print disabilities were just as likely to adopt a deep or a strategic approach to studying as were the students with no disability, and there was no significant difference in the satisfaction ratings of the students with and without print disabilities. Finally, there were no significant differences between the experiences of the students with print disabilities who used the electronic system and the experiences of those who used audio recordings, and no significant differences between the experiences of the students with print disabilities who were visually impaired and the experiences of those with another kind of disability.
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Questionnaire responses of 457 students and 602 tutors were used to investigate conceptions of a ... more Questionnaire responses of 457 students and 602 tutors were used to investigate conceptions of a 'good tutor.'In each case, factor analysis identified scales that reflected key constructs; cluster analysis identified subgroups with different patterns of scale scores; ...
Studies in Higher Education, Mar 1, 2009
This study investigated the role of disablement as a predictor of academic attainment among stude... more This study investigated the role of disablement as a predictor of academic attainment among students awarded first degrees by UK institutions of higher education in 2004–05. Disability explained only 0.1% of the variation in attainment, as measured by whether the graduates had obtained good degrees (i.e. with first‐class or upper second‐class honours). Graduates with dyslexia and graduates with multiple disabilities were less likely to obtain good degrees than graduates with no known disability, but this was mainly due to the confounded effects of demographic and institutional variables. Graduates with an unseen disability were the only group to show significantly poorer attainment when the latter variables had been controlled. In overall terms, disablement per se does not play a significant role in predicting attainment.
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Papers by John S Richardson