Purpose: Employability is a major educational goal, but employability programmes emphasise skill development, while employers value performance. Education acts as a model for employment, so educational performance assessment should be aligned with employment models. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between…

Purpose: This paper aims to assess the perception of the Ghanaian construction industry of the performance of entry-level building technology graduates. Also, other non-technical skills or attributes expected from building technology graduates are to be compared with the actual proficiency of the graduates. Design/methodology/approach: The…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the situated understandings that higher education students can offer on their employability, and to make sense of "employability" in industry and career context-specific ways. The paper further seeks to explore potential critical reflections on emerging professional practice and future employment…

Purpose: Achieving organisational learning and greater specificity for implementation action for health-promoting schools requires detailed understanding of the necessary components. They include: preparing and planning for school development, policy and institutional anchoring, professional development and learning, leadership and management…

Purpose: Efforts to create a scientific base for the health-promoting school approach have so far not articulated a clear "Science of Delivery". There is thus a need for systematic identification of clearly operationalised implementation components. To address a next step in the refinement of the health-promoting schools' work, this paper sets out…

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to test a comprehensive nutrition program developed specifically to target low-income parents of young school-aged children and determine whether the programme-resulted in changes in parents' knowledge, attitude, self-confidence, and behaviours related to both their and their child's nutrition in relation…

Purpose: Media images of unrealistic beauty have been identified as a determinant of women's body dissatisfaction. This experimental study aims to explore whether the negative impact of such images could be reduced by a one-time educational intervention consisting of a presentation and discussion, teaching women to be critical of media images.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to report the perceived impact of various health concerns on the academic performance of health sciences graduate students. Design/methodology/approach: The American College Health Association's National College Health Assessment (ACHA-NCHA), a 58-item anonymous survey, was distributed to all graduate health…

The forces acting on a ball in an air jet have been measured using simple equipment. Such measurements allow quite a precise, non-ambiguous description and understanding of the physical mechanism which explains the famous levitating ball experiment. (Contains 7 figures.)

This article describes the genesis and nature of a 40-day course intended to improve the teaching of physics in England by teachers not originally trained in the subject. It also describes early experiences and discusses course evaluation. An accompanying article by James de Winter reviews experiences as described by participating teachers.…

This article aims to explore some of the experiences of participants on the Science as an Additional Specialism (SASP) physics course. It draws from feedback, assignment work and course evaluations from all of the 22 teachers who were participants on the course at the Science Learning Centre East of England at Bayfordbury, in the 2009-10 academic…

A context-based module to introduce secondary school students to the study of the optical properties of materials and geometric optics is presented. The module implements an innovative teaching approach in which the behaviour of the chosen application, in this article, the optical fibre, is iteratively explored and modelled by means of a…

We describe an example of learning with multiple representations in an A-level revision lesson on mechanics. The context of the problem involved the motion of a ball thrown vertically upwards in air and studying how the associated physical quantities changed during its flight. Different groups of students were assigned to look at the ball's motion…

At the introductory level, the demonstration and analysis of sound beating is usually limited to the superposition of two purely sinusoidal waves with equal amplitudes and very similar frequencies. Under such conditions, an observer hears the periodic variation of the loudness of a sound with an unchanging timbre. On the other hand, when complex…

The enormous progress in the fields of microsystem technology, microelectronics and computer science has led to the development of powerful high speed cameras. Recently a number of such cameras became available as low cost consumer products which can also be used for the teaching of physics. The technology of high speed cameras is discussed,…