Everyday Academic Life Research Articles

Approach to a causal model between attitudes and environmental behaviour. A graduate case study

This paper offers a study of the environmental attitudes of graduates from the University of Zaragoza and their relationship with pro-environmental behaviour. These attitudes were analysed using a validated Likert scale, along with a questionnaire on environmental behaviours. A set of 20 items in the scale were grouped into four categories: Formation, Outreach activities, Conservation and Intention to act. Also, a set of 12 items were used to evaluate environmental behaviour. Structural equation modelling was used to test a causal model relating attitude to behaviours. The model shows the connection between two of the attitudinal factors – conservation and intention to act – with pro-environmental behaviour. The most relevant to the causal model is that the Conservation factor is the one that has shown the closest relation with Behaviour and this relation is shown through the Intention to act. The study involved 60 graduates that belong to departments that offer either compulsory or optional courses concerning the environment. This study suggests that conservation perspective should be considered in the university studies, both in interdisciplinary education programs and research programs. Moreover, the results obtained in this research work suggest that providing in the University adequate resources and habits in everyday academic life turns to be a very significant aspect for fostering pro-environmental behaviour.

If You're So Smart, Why Are You under Surveillance? Universities, Neoliberalism, and New Public Management

Although universities have undergone changes since the dawn of their existence, the speed of change started to accelerate remarkably in the 1960s. Spectacular growth in the number of students and faculty was immediately followed by administrative reforms aimed at managing this growth and managing the demands of students for democratic reform and societal relevance. Since the 1980s, however, an entirely different wind has been blowing along the academic corridors. The fiscal crisis of the welfare states and the neoliberal course of the Reagan and Thatcher governments made the battle against budget deficits and against government spending into a political priority. Education, together with social security and health care, were targeted directly. As the eighties went on, the neoliberal agenda became more radical—smaller state and bigger market—attacking the public sector itself through efforts to systematically reduce public expenditure by privatizing public services and introducing market incentives. At the

CRITERION‐RELATED VALIDITY OF THE TOEFL IBT LISTENING SECTION

ABSTRACTThe study investigated the criterion‐related validity of the Test of English as a Foreign Language™ Internet‐based test (TOEFL® iBT) Listening section by examining its relationship to a criterion measure designed to reflect language‐use tasks that university students encounter in everyday academic life: listening to academic lectures. The design of the criterion measure was informed by students' responses to a survey on the frequency and importance of various classroom tasks that require academic listening, and the relationship of these tasks to successful course completion. The criterion measure consisted of three videotaped lectures (in physics, history, and psychology) and included tasks created by content experts who are former university professors of the relevant content area. These tasks reflected what the content experts expected students to have comprehended during the lecture.The criterion measure and the TOEFL iBT Listening section were administered to nonnative speakers of English who were enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs. Data from 221 participants were analyzed. Substantial correlations were observed between the criterion measure and the TOEFL iBT Listening section score for the entire sample and for subgroups (Pearson correlation coefficients ranging from .56 to .74 and disattenuated correlations ranging from .62 to .82). Moreover, the analysis of the mean scores on the criterion measure for different ability groups indicated that participants who scored at or above typical cut scores for international student admission to academic programs (i.e., TOEFL iBT Listening section score of 14 or above) scored, on average, nearly 50% or more on the criterion measure, demonstrating reasonable comprehension of the academic lectures.

Academic resilience and academic buoyancy: multidimensional and hierarchical conceptual framing of causes, correlates and cognate constructs

‘Academic resilience’ refers to a student’s capacity to overcome acute or chronic adversities that are seen as major assaults on educational processes. Although intersecting with highly vulnerable and important populations, academic resilience does not map onto the many students who are faced with setbacks, challenges and pressures that are part of more regular academic life. This, it is argued, reflects ‘academic buoyancy’ that maps onto the many students who must negotiate the ups and downs of everyday academic life as distinct from acute and chronic adversities relevant to more traditional constructions of academic resilience. Inherent in this argument, then, is a proposed hierarchical framework in which academic buoyancy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for academic resilience. Such a hierarchical framework, therefore, has the potential to speak to all students and so represents an encompassing framework that can more fully explain the nature and extent of adversities and challenges that are part of academic life. We further contend that academic resilience and academic buoyancy require multidimensional approaches to their conceptualising and measurement in order to most effectively differentiate the factors that are (and are not) components, causes, correlates and cognate to them. We conclude by proposing a number of conceptual and empirical approaches to a next generation of research into academic resilience and academic buoyancy, develop the notion of ‘leading’ and ‘lagging’ indicators of buoyancy and resilience, and identify the implications of our framework for intervention and policy in the academic domain and beyond.