Education - OU Community Online

'not only did students’ performance improve by 15 per cent, but teachers’ English was better'

Danny, who’s working towards an OU degree in Sport Fitness and Coaching, is planning to run more than 60 miles competing in four races to raise money for his local hospice – all within a single week.

More information

• BSc Honours Sport, Fitness and Coaching
• Foundation degree in Sport and Fitness 
• Introduction to sport, fitness and management E112

The research is investigating whether the brains of people with OCD function differently to those without OCD.

Preliminary findings suggest some systematic and interesting differences between brain activity in people with OCD, and non-OCD controls, even in a relaxed state. However, to obtain a more detailed picture researchers need to find more participants with OCD.

They are looking for people between 18 and 60 years of age, who have been diagnosed with OCD and have no learning disabilities.

If you decide to participate, they will need four hours of your time. The timing of these sessions can be flexible and scheduled according to your convenience.

During this time, your brain activity will be recorded using a safe, non-invasive and painless technique known as Quantitative Electroencephalography, or QEEG. You will also be interviewed and asked to fill in a questionnaire.

The study generally takes place at the OU in Milton Keynes or in Camden in London. Travel costs will be reimbursed. In some cases researchers will be able to come to your town or a town near you to perform the scans and interviews.

By participating in this study, you will be contributing to scientific advancements in OCD research. Additionally, you will gain interesting insights about how your brain may have been affected by OCD.

You can get more information from the QEEG and Brain Research Lab project page. If you wish to take part, or have any enquiries, please contact Loes Koorenhof by calling  01908 659 472, or email loes.koorenhof@open.ac.uk

Thirteen years after the ambitious project was launched to follow the lives of 25 children born in 2000, we revisit the Millennium babies as they are about to become teenagers. 

We discover how they have coped with bullying, having a famous mum, learning to live with money worries, the divorce of their parents, getting into trouble at school and bereavement.

As well as hearing from the children now, the series draws on its rich archive to give us an insight into what has gone before.

Becoming a Teenager, a free booklet to accompany the series, is available by calling 0845 030 4015 or via the Open Learn Child of our Time 2013 website.

On the OpenLearn website you can also to take part in research into child development, read about childhood issues and learn more about the teenage years.  

Child of our time will be screened at 9pm on BBC One on Wednesday 27 and Thursday 28 February

Useful links

Childhood and Youth courses at the OU

A study by the OU and Durham University looked at trends in the gap between local teenage pregnancy rates and the national average. A fall in the gap was found in areas with a higher proportion of black and ethnic minority populations and a rise was revealed in areas where standards for commissioning services had been assessed as excellent or good.

Researcher Professor Tim Blackman from the OU’s Faculty of Social Sciences reports his findings in the latest edition of the journal Social Policy and Society, published by Cambridge University Press.

The research
Blackman studied 27 out of 70 ‘spearhead’ local authority areas designated by the last Labour government as needing increased resources to tackle health deprivation and inequality issues. He looked at teenage pregnancy rates in each of the 27 areas between the years 2005 and 2009, when the latest data on teen pregnancy rates was available.

At ‘baseline’ in 2005, local rates varied from 38.1 to 85.0 conceptions per 1,000 fifteen to seventeen-year-olds, against a national average of 41.4. By 2009, the local rates varied from 41.0 to 69.4, against a national average that had dropped to 40.2.

In areas where the standard of commissioning services was assessed as high, the teen pregnancies gap actually increased. Blackman said this had been the most surprising finding of his research:

“Many people would expect to find that areas which had apparently excellent planning and commissioning would have done better at closing their teen pregnancy gap than other areas but this didn’t prove to be the case. In fact, the opposite was true and it appears to have made things worse.”

Research with professionals working in these areas revealed that this apparently good practice was accompanied by an increase in bureaucracy and process, which had taken time and attention away from actually getting things done. Where this was not in the way, the professionals said they were able to get on with the job of helping teens on the ground.

A suprise finding
In areas where the gap was narrowing and pregnancy rates were falling, Blackman discovered that there was a higher proportion of black and ethnic minority groups in the local population. He reports this was also a surprising finding as these had been among the areas which had previously struggled with rising rates of teen conception:

“The answer may be found in increased awareness of the risk of infection and rising educational aspirations and achievement among young black and ethnic minority populations. Out of the 27 areas we studied, 11 had a high proportion of black and ethnic minority groups in their population and 8 of these 11 had falling teen pregnancy rates and narrowing gaps. The areas where there was a low black and ethnic minority population all had rates that were either not falling as fast or actually rising.”

He also found that the areas with falling conception rates had a higher proportion of under 18s in the population. Blackman concludes that these areas are more likely to have a high level of services overall to help young people in many aspects of their lives, steering them away from vulnerability to early pregnancy.

Falling teen pregnancy rates were also found in areas where fewer people were being treated for drug addiction: low numbers of people being treated for drugs may indicate a lower prevalence of risky behaviours generally in that area.

The areas studied by Blackman have been kept anonymous as a condition of NHS ethics approval and to encourage truthful responses from individuals surveyed in the research.

Tim Blackman is the OU’s Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research, Scholarship and Quality. A Professor of Sociology and Social Policy, he was elected to the Academy of Social Sciences in 2004. He is a former Director of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing at Durham University.

Find out more:

• Read the paper in full
• Research at the OU

SusTEACH has developed a freely available online toolkit to support universities in planning more sustainable courses. 

It includes a carbon calculator which allows students and lecturers to work out their own carbon impact on a particular course.

SusTEACH analysed more than 30 higher education courses and concluded that courses using ICT and distance teaching methods are more environmentally friendly than campus-based ones.

"We found that the main sources of carbon impacts are associated with travel, residential energy consumption and campus site operations," says Dr Sally Caird, research fellow in the OU's faculty of Maths, Computing and Technology.

"The use of online and ICT-enhanced teaching and delivery methods, as well as traditional distance teaching, reduced these sources of energy consumption, and were therefore able to achieve significant carbon reductions."

The SusTEACH tool kit will be used across the OU in a number of qualifications and programmes, says Andy Lane, the OU's Professor of Environmental Systems, adding "we will look at it in the BSc in Environmental Management and Technology". 

The project was a finalist in the Research and Development category of the 2012 Green Gown Awards, which celebrate sustainability achievements in higher and further education. The category winner was Scotland's Rural College (SRUC).

For more information about SusTeach and the OU's efforts to reduce its carbon footprint see the SusTeach video 

Related courses

• Environmental Studies at The Open University

Image:Thinkstock

A new research paper Talk Factory: Supporting 'exploratory talk' around an interactive whiteboard in primary school science plenaries has been produced by Dr Lucinda Kerawalla, Lecturer in Childhood and Youth Studies in the OU’s Faculty of Education and Language Studies, following the creation of a new piece of classroom software called Talk Factory.

Dr Kerawalla, together with colleagues Professor Eileen Scanlon and Dr Marilena Petrou, designed Talk Factory as a tool which teachers and students can use to support their understanding of the useful features of classroom discussions, and to provide immediate feedback on how well each child is contributing.

The technological support of classroom plenaries has remained relatively unexplored until now. By using Talk Factory, children can learn how to problem solve through dialogue with each other, using ‘prompts’ on an interactive whiteboard rather than simply responding to questions from the teacher. Talk Factory can put children in the driving seat while their teacher becomes a facilitator.

Positive, managed and measured
Dr Kerawalla explains: “A dialogic approach to teaching, focusing on the development of children’s oracy throughout all curriculum subject areas, is very much on the agenda at the moment but shifting teaching styles and the student’s responses towards this approach can be extremely challenging for any teacher or school. This is where Talk Factory comes in, software designed to help teachers encourage debate and conjecture and problem solving in their classrooms in a positive, managed and measured way.”

Then, as the class begins to discuss a topic, the teacher will record their progress by tapping on the rules displayed on the  interactive whiteboard, effectively evaluating how each child’s utterance contributes to the overall discussion (in line with the above rules) and facilitating reminders to pupils of the rules that will help them discuss more positively and constructively. This in turn generates real time graphical representations of the content of students' whole class discussions in, for example, a bar chart, which teachers and pupils can use to help them evaluate how well they are doing, and make any adjustments if necessary.

Dr Kerawalla adds: “The public and dynamically-evolving nature of the graphical representations on the classroom whiteboard means that this can be used by students to elicit instant feedback on their conversations. In this way, the teachers’ use of Talk Factory plays a central role in opening up a dialogic space where ideas could be put forward, respected, scrutinised and challenged in a supportive discursive environment.

"Overall, where Talk Factory was used in the recent study, we found that teachers adopted a more facilitative role focussing on prompting students for explanatory responses and drawing students into the debate, rather than taking a lead role in steering the direction of the dialogue towards the production of outcomes set by themselves.”

'Dramatic leap in self-realisation'
The Talk Factory software was showcased at an Open University/UK Literacy Association (UKLA) workshop in 2011 and as a result new versions, designed to support discussion in any subject area, have already been adopted by Cornwall Learning and is in use in primary and secondary school throughout Cornwall.

Katie Fitzsimmons, Assistant Head Teacher at Fowey Community College in Cornwall, has supported the development of Talk Factory in classrooms, working with it across a range of subjects from maths to geography.  She says this was done through the explicit teaching of rules for group talking supported by the Talk Factory software.

She said: “Talk Factory yielded some excellent results in engaging our students in more effective talking in lessons. This in turn has enabled students to see how they can expand their written responses and build on input from others in their group, linking speaking with writing. As one member of staff commented ‘The development of the class within one 100 minute lesson was nothing short of phenomenal. It was the quickest and most dramatic leap in self-realisation that I have ever seen in 11 years in the classroom.’”

Talk Factory is a tool that has a dual role: it helps teachers to model and encourage the positive features of discussion and argumentation, and it enables students to take part more effectively in argumentation by increasing their understanding of how to talk together effectively.

• Get a free download of the Talk Factory software