Section 3

Dr Blake:     Come in. Ah yes. Stella is Phil there too? Good. Come on in. OK, so you’re here to discuss your research project. Have you decided what to focus on? You were thinking of something about the causes of mood changes, weren't you?

Stella:     Yes, but the last time we saw you, you suggested we narrowed it down to either the effects of weather or urban environment, so we've decided to focus on the effects of weather

Dr Blake:     Right. That's more manageable. So. your goal is ... Phil?

Phil:     To prove the hypothesis no, to investigate the hypothesis that the weather has an effect on a person's mood.

Dr Blake:     Mmm. Good And what's your thesis? Stella?

Stella:     Well, our thesis is that in general, when the weather's good it has a positive effect on a person's mood and bad weather has a negative effect.

Dr Blake:     Mmm Can you define your terms here - for example, what do you mean by ‘good' and 'bad'?

Phil:     OK. Well, good would be sunny, warm weather and bad would be when it's cold and cloudy or raining

Dr Blake:     And how would you define an effect on a person's mood? What would you be looking to find?

Phil:     An effect on the way a person feels ..

Dr Blake:     Mmm?

Stella:     A change in the way they feel? Erm, like from feeling happy and optimistic, to sad and depressed

Dr Blake:     Right. And what sort of weather variables will you be looking at?

Phil:     Oh. sunshine, temperature, cloudiness, precipitation among others. It'll depend a bit what the weather’s like when we do the survey­.

Dr Blake: Fine We'll talk about that in a minute. But first, what about background reading? I gave you some suggestions did you manage to read any of it ?

Stella:     Yes - we read the Ross Vickers article the one comparing the groups of American Marines training in summer and winter. That's quite relevant to our study, t was interesting because the Marines who were training in the cold winter conditions tried to cheer themselves up by thinking of warm places, but it didn’t really work.

Phil:     Yes, they were trying to force themselves to have a positive mental outlook but in fact it had the opposite effect, and they ended up in a very negative state of mind.

Stella:     And we found some more research by someone who wasn't on the reading list you gave us - George Whitebourne. He compared people living in three countries with very different climatic conditions. Actually he looked at several things, not just the weather, but he found some people's reactions to bad weather were much worse than others and it was linked to how stressed they were generally - the weather on its own didn't have such a significant effect on mood.

Phil:     And we looked at a paper by Haver.

Stella:     Havedon.

Phil:     Yeah. He broke weather up into about fifteen or sixteen categories and did qualitative and quantitative research, he found that humans respond to conditions in the weather with immediate responses, such as fear or amazement, but these responses can also be linked to associations from their earlier life, such as a particular happy or sad event.

Dr Blake:     Did you have a look at Stanfield's work?

Stella:     Yes. It was interesting because the type of questions he asked were similar to what we were planning to use in our survey.

Dr Blake:     Yes?

Stella:     He asked people how they were feeling on days with good and had weather. He found the biggest factor seemed to be the humidity moods were most negative on days with a lot of rainfall. Long periods without sunshine had some effect but nothing like as much.

Dr Blake:     Mmm That could be quite a useful model for your project.

Phil:     Yes. we thought so loo - although. We can't continue our survey for as long as he did - he d d his over a six- month period.

Dr Blake:     Right, well, you've made quite a good start. So, where are you going from here?

Phil:     Well, we’ve already made the questionnaire we're going to use for the survey - it’s quite short, just eight questions. We're aiming to survey twenty people, over a period of three months from October to December.

Stella:     We can't specify the actual dates yet, because it depends on the weather - we want to do the survey on days with a range of different weather conditions. And we’ll just be working on campus, so our data will only be statistically sound for the student population here.

Dr Blake:     That's OK. Have you Thought how you'll determine what will constitute each aspect of weather and how many you’re looking at?

Phil:     We decided on four - the amount of sunshine, cloudiness, temperature and precipitation ... we thought we might use the Internet to get data on weather conditions on the days we do the survey but we haven't found the information we need, so we might have to measure it ourselves. We'll see.

Stella:     Then we've got to analyse the results, and we’ll do that using a spreadsheet, giving numeric values to answers .... and then of course we have to present our findings to the class, and we want to make it quite an interactive session, we want to involve the class in some way in the presentation, maybe by trying to create different climatic conditions in the classroom, but we’re still thinking about it.

Dr Blake:     I see. Well, that sounds as il you're on the right lines. Now, what I'd suggest that you think about...

Section 3

Jack:     Katy, hi. Thanks for inviting me round.

Katy:     Thanks for coming know you're up to your neck in finals revision, but I've got to make up my mind about next year's Geography field trip and I'd really like your advice. We've got to choose between an African trip and one in Europe. They've told us a bit about both trips in the lecture but I really can't make up my mind, and I know you did the African one last year.

Jack:     That's right.

Katy:     So, where exactly did you go? I mean. I know it was in Kenya, in East Africa ...

Jack:     Yes, well, we were right up in the north-west of the country. It was beautiful. We stayed in a place called the Marich Pass Field Studies Centre.

Katy:     Right. Dr Rowe said the accommodation was traditional African-style cottages. er. he had a special name for them ..

Jack:     Bandas. Yes, they're fine. You have to share two or three people together. They're pretty basic but you have a mosquito net. They don't provide spray though so remember to take plenty with you - you'll need it. And there's no electricity in the Field Centre - you’ll have hurricane lamps instead They give a good light, it's no problem.

Katy:     What about places to study? Dr Rowe said there was a library ...

Jack:     Yes. but it’s quite small. There's a lecture room as well - but most of us worked out in the open air, there are plenty of places outside. And it's so beautiful - you're right in the middle of the forest clearing

Katy:     I gather it's a relatively unmodernised area?

Jack:     Definitely. They actually set up the centre there because it's on the boundaries of two distinct ecological zones the mountains, where the people are mainly agriculturalists, and the semi-arid plains lower down, where they're semi nomadic pastoralists.

Katy:     So, how much chance did you get to meet the local people there? Did you get die chance to do interviews?

Jack:     Yes though we had to use local interpreters. But that was OK. Then we did field observation, of course, looking at environmental and cultural conditions, and morphological mapping.

Katy:     What's that?

Jack:     Oh. Looking at the surface forms of the landscape, the slope elements and so on.

Katy:     What about specific projects?

Jack:     Yes. After the first two or three days, we spent most of our time on those. We could pretty well do what we wanted, although they all had to relate to issues concerned with development in some way. People did various things .. some were based on social and cultural topics, like the effect of education on the aspirations of young people, and some did more physical process-based studies, looking at things like soil erosion. My group actually looked at issues relating to water, things like sources such as rivers and wells, and quality and so on. It was a good project to work on, but, a bit frustrating - we felt we needed a lot more time really.

Katy:     Right. Dr Rowe did say something about limiting project scope.

Jack:     Yes, he told us that too at the beginning and I can see why now. What else ... well, we had some good trips out as part of the course. We went to a market town a place called Sigor - that was to study distribution and to look at agricultural production we went to the Wei Wei valley, that's an important agricultural region.

Katy:     And what about animals? Did you have a chance to go to a national park?

Jack:     Sure, we did a top on the last day, on the way back to the airport at Nairobi. But actually there was lots of wildlife at the Field Centre vervet monkeys and baboons and lizards ..

Katy:     Mmm. It does sound good.

Jack:     It was excellent, I‘d say. In terms of logistics it was very well run, but it was more than that I mean, it's not the sort of place I‘d ever have got to on my own, and it was a real eye-opener - it got me really interested in development issues and the way other people live. I did find it frustrating at the time that we couldn't get as far as we wanted on the project, but actually I'm going to follow it up in my dissertation, so it's given me some ideas and data for that as well.

Katy:     So you'd say it was worth the extra money?

Jack:     Definitely.

For my presentation, I’m going to summarise what I’ve found out about efforts to save one plant species ... the juniper bush. It once flourished in Britain and throughout the world’s temperate zones, but over the last few decades has declined considerably. Before I go on to explain the steps being taken to save it in England, let me start by looking at some background information and why the juniper has been so important in cultural as well as ecological terms, historically and in the present day.

Firstly, I want to emphasise the fact that juniper is a very ancient plant. It has been discovered that it was actually amongst the first species of plants to establish itself in Britain in the period following the most recent (31) Ice Age. And, as I say, it has a much valued place in British culture. It was used widely as a fuel during the Middle Ages because, when burnt, the smoke given off is all but (32) invisible and so any illicit activities involving fire could go on without being detected, for example, cooking game hunted illegally. It also has valuable medicinal properties. Particularly during large epidemics, oils were extracted from the juniper wood and sprayed in the air to try to prevent the spread of (33) infection in hospital wards. And these days, perhaps its most well known use is in cuisine...cooking, where its berries are a much-valued ingredient, used to (34) flavour a variety of meat dishes and also drinks.

Turning now to ecological issues, juniper bushes play an important role in supporting other living things. If juniper bushes are wiped out, this would radically affect many different insect and also (35) fungus species. We simply cannot afford to let this species die out.

So, why is the juniper plant declining at such a rapid rate? Well a survey conducted in the north and west of Britain in two thousand and four to five showed that a major problem is the fact that in present-day populations, ratios between the (36) sexes are unbalanced and without a proper mix of male and female, bushes don’t get pollinated. Also, the survey found that in a lot of these populations, the plants are the same age, so this means that bushes grow old and start to die at similar times leading to (37) swift extinction of whole populations.

Now, the charity Plantlife is trying to do something to halt the decline in juniper species. It’s currently trying out two new major salvage techniques, this time focusing on (38) lowland regions of England. The first thing it’s trying is to provide (39) shelters for the seedlings in areas where juniper populations are fairly well established. These, of course, are designed to help protect the plants at their most vulnerable stage. A further measure is that in areas where colonies have all but died out, numbers are being bolstered by the planting of (40) cuttings which have been taken from healthy bushes elsewhere.

Now, I hope I’ve given a clear picture of the problems facing this culturally and ecologically valuable plant and of the measures being taken by Plantlife to tackle them. If anyone has any questions, I’d be happy to ...

Section 4

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the sixth of our Ecology evening classes. Nice to see you all again. As you know from the programme, today I want to talk to you about some research that is pushing back the frontiers of the whole field ol ecology. And this research is being carried out in the remoter regions of our planet .. places where the environment is harsh and until recently it was thought that the conditions couldn't sustain life of any kind. But, life forms are being found and these have been grouped into what is now known as extremophiles that is, organisms that can survive in the most extreme environments. And these discoveries may be setting a huge challenge for the scientists of the future, as you'll see in a minute.

Now, the particular research I want to tell you about was carried out in Antarctica one of the coldest and driest places on Earth. But a multinational team of researchers - from the US, Canada and New Zealand - recently discovered colonies of microbes in the soil there, where no one thought it was possible. Interestingly enough, some of the colonies were identified as a type of fungus called Beauvena Bassiana a fungus that lives on insects. But where are the insects in these utterly empty regions of Antarctica? The researchers concluded that this was clear evidence that these colonies were certainly not new arrivals they might've been there for centuries, or even millennia possibly even since the last Ice Age'. Can you imagine their excitement?

Now, some types of microbes had previously been found living just a few millimetres under the surface of rocks porous, Antarctic rocks, but this was the first time that living colonies had been found surviving - erm relatively deeply in the soil itself, several centimetres down in fact.

So, the big question is: how can these colonies survive there? Well, we know that the organisms living very near the rock surface can still be warmed by the sun, so they can survive in their own microclimate ... and this keeps them from freezing during the day But this isn't the case for the colonies that are hidden under the soil. 

In their research paper, this team suggested that the very high amounts of salt in the soil might be the clue because this is what is preventing essential water from freezing.

The team found that the salt concentration increased the deeper down they went in the soil But while they had expected the number of organisms to be fewer down there, they actually found the opposite. In soil that had as much as 3000 parts of salt per million, relatively high numbers ol microbes were present - which seems incredible! But the point is that at those levels of salt, the temperature could drop to minus 56 degrees before frost would cause any damage to the organisms

This relationship between microbes and salt at temperatures way below the normal freezing point of water - is a really significant breakthrough As you all know, life is dependent on the availability of water in liquid form, and the role of salt al very low temperatures could be the key to survival in these kinds of conditions. Now the process at work here is called supercooling - and that's usually written as one word but it isn’t really understood as yet, so, there's a lot more for researchers to work on However, the fact that this process occurs naturally in Antarctica, may suggest that it might occur in other places with similar conditions, including on our neighbouring planet, Mars. So, you can start to see the wider implications of this kind of research.

In short, it appears to support the growing belief that extraterrestrial life might be able to survive the dry, cold conditions on other planets alter all. Not only does this research produce evidence that life is possible there, it’s also informing scientists of the locationswhere it might be found. So all of this might have great significance for future unmanned space missions.

One specialist on Mars confirms the importance …

Section 4

When we took at theories of education and learning we see a constant shifting of views as established theories are questioned and refined or even replaced, and we can see this very clearly in the way that attitudes towards bilingualism have changed.

Let’s start with a definition of bilingualism, and for our purposes today, we can say it's the ability to communicate with the same degree of proficiency in at least two languages. Now, in practical terms this might seem like a good thing - something we'd all like to be able to do. However, early research done with children in the USA in fact suggested that being bilingual interfered in some way with learning and with the development of their mental processes, and so in those days bilingualism was regarded as something to be avoided, and parents were encouraged to bring their children up as monolingual - just speaking one language, But this research, which took place in the early part of the twentieth century is now regarded as unsound for various reasons, mainly because it didn't take into account other factors such as the children's social and economicbackgrounds

Now, in our last lecture we were looking at some of the research that's been done into the way children learn, into their cognitive development, and in fact we believe now that the relationship between bilingualism and cognitive development is actually a positive one, it turns out that cognitive skills such as problem solving, which don't seem at first glance to have anything to do with how many languages you speak, are better among bilingual children than monolingual ones.

And quite recently there's been some very interesting work done by Ellen Bialystok at York University' in Canada, she's been doing various studies on the effects of bilingualism and her findings provide some evidence that they might apply to adults as well, they’re not just restricted to children.

So how do you go about investigating something like this? Well, Dr Bialystok used groups of monolingual and bilingual subjects, aged from 30 right up to 88 for one experiment, she used a computer program which displayed either a red or a blue square on the screen. The coloured square could come up on either the left-hand or the right- hand side of the screen. If the square was blue, the subject had to press the left 'shift' key on the keyboard and if the square was red they had to press the right shift key. So they didn't have to react at all to the actual position of the square on the screen, just to the colour they saw. And she measured the subjects' reaction times by recording how long it took them to press the shift key. and how often they got it right.

What she was particularly interested in was whether it took the subject longer to react when a square lit up on one side of the screen - say the left, and the subject had to press the shift key on the right band side. She'd expected that it would take more processing time than if a square lit up on the left and the candidates had to press a left key.

This was because of a phenomenon known as the 'Simon effect', where, basically the brain gets a bit confused because of conflicting demands being made on it - in this case seeing something on the right, and having to react on the left and this causes a person's reaction times to slow down.

The results of the experiment showed that the bilingual subjects responded more quickly than the monolingual ones. That was true both when the squares were on the 'correct' side of the screen, so to speak, and - even more so - when they were not. So, bilingual people were better able to deal with the Simon effect than the monolingual ones.

So, what's the explanation for this? Well, the result of the experiment suggests that bilingual people are better at ignoring information which is irrelevant to the task in hand and just concentrating on what's important. One suggestion given by Dr Bialystok was that it might be because someone who speaks two languages can suppress the activity of parts of the brain when it isn't needed in particular, the part that processes whichever language isn’t being used at that particular time.

Well, she Then went on to investigate that with a second experiment, but again the bilingual group performed better, and what was particularly interesting, and this is I think why the experiments have received so much publicity, is that in all cases, the performance gap between monolingual and bilinguals actually increased with age - which suggests that bilingualism protects the mind against decline, so in some way the life-long experience of managing two languages may prevent some of the negative effects of aging. So that’s a very different story from the early research.

So what are the implications of this for education . .

Section 4

All over the world, there are passionate arguments going on about how educational systems can be improved And ol all the ideas for improving education, few are as simple or attractive as reducing the number of pupils per teacher. It seems like common sense but do these ideas have any theoretical basis? Today, I want to look at the situation in the USA and at some of the research that has been done here in America on the effects of reducing class sizes. In the last couple of decades or so, there has been considerable concern in the United States over educational standards here, following revelations that the country's secondary school students perform poorly relative to Asian and European students. In addition, statistics have shown that students in the nation's lower income schools in the urban areas have achievement levels far below those of middle-class and upper middle-class schools.

So would reducing class sizes solve these problems?

Well, we have to remember that it does have one obvious drawback, it’s expensive. It requires more teachers and possibly more classrooms, equipment, and so on. On the other hand, it smaller classes really do work, the eventual economic benefits could be huge. Better education would mean that workers did their jobs more efficiently, saving the country millions of dollars, it would also mean that people were better informed about their health, bringing savings m things like medical costs and days off sick.

So what reliable information do we have about the effects of reducing class sizes? There's plenty of anecdotal evidence about the effect on students' behaviour. But what reliable evidence do we have for this?

Let's have a look at three research projects that have been carried out in the USA in the last couple of decades or so. The first study I'm going to look at took place in the state of Tennessee in the late 1980s. It involved some 70 schools. In its first year about 6,400 students were involved, and by the end of the study, four years later, the total number involved had grown to 12,000. What happened was that students entering kindergarten were randomly assigned lo either small classes of 13 to 17 students or regular-size classes of 27 to 26. The students remained in whatever category they had been assigned to through the third grade, and then after that they joined a regular classroom.

After the study ended in 1989, researchers conducted dozens of analyses of the data. Researchers agree that there was significant benefit for students in attending smaller classes, and it also appears that the beneficial effect was stronger for minority students. However, there's no agreement on the implications of this we still don't know the answer to questions like how long students have to be in smaller classes to get a benefit and how big that benefit is, for example.

The second project was much larger and took place in California. Like the Tennessee study, it focused on students from kindergarten through to grade 3, but in this case, all schools throughout the state were involved. The experiment is still continuing, but results have been very inconclusive, with very little improvement noted. And the project has in fact also had several negative aspects.

It meant an increased demand for teachers in almost all California districts, so the better-paying districts got a lot of the best teachers - including a fair number that moved over from the poorer districts. And there were a lot of other problems with the project - for example, there weren't any effective procedures for evaluation. All in all, this project stands as a model of what not to do in a major research project.

A third initiative took place in the state of Wisconsin at around the same time as the California project began, and it's interesting to compare the two. The Wisconsin project was small class sizes were reduced in just 14 schools - but it was noteworthy because it targeted schools at which a significant proportion of the students were from poor families, compared with California's one-size- fits-all approach. Analysts have found that the results are very similar to the Tennessee project, with students making gains that are statistically significant and that are considerably larger than those calculated for the California initiative.

Now, I'd like to apply some of these ideas to....

Section 4

For my website design project, I decided lo approach Supersave supermarkets, because I have an evening job at the supermarket, so I already have a slight insight into their organisational goals and workings.

The field research for my project was in two stages.

First, I had an interview with Mr Dunne, who is in charge of Supersave's customer care department. I discussed the project with him in order to identify the supermarket's requirements. Mr Dunne said customers are often unwilling to make a face-to-face complaint when they've experienced difficulties with a product, or a member of staff, or anything related to the supermarket. So he said a website which allowed members of the public to get in touch with the organisation and bring the problem to their attention in a privatemanner might be very useful, and we agreed that I’d work on this.

For the second stage of my research, I devised a questionnaire to put to Supersave customers. I needed to find out about the customers' experiences of problems, together with their attitudes towards making complaints, both directly and indirectly. I used a mixture of closed questions such as 'Have you ever experienced a problem at any Supersave store?' and open questions such as 'What would you find helpful about a customer complaint website?’

I decided to do interviews rather than rely on distribution of the questionnaire, as I felt this was likely to lead to a higher take-up rate. I visited four Supersave stores, two in the city centre and two in the outskirts and altogether I interviewed 101 respondents. Then finally, I analysed the results.

I found the results of the questionnaires to be very informative. I found that out of the total number of customers investigated, 64 percent had at some stage encountered a problem in a Supersave Store. Out of these people, the vast majority said that they hadn’t reported the problem to any member of staff they’d just kept it to themselves. The next thing I tried to find out was why they hadn't complained. Well, about 25 percent of the people I interviewed said the reason was that they couldn't be bothered, and a slightly smaller percentage said they didn't have enough time, but 55 percent said the reason was that they felt intimidated. I finally asked if they would be more likely to complain if they didn't have to do it face-to-face, and nearly everyone I asked said that they would - 95 percent, to be exact.

I then set about designing the website to meet these needs. Once l'd completed the website, I made another appointment with Mr Dunne, to find out what he thought of it.

Mr Dunne said he felt that the pages would benefit his organisation by giving customers a new way of expressing their complaints, and by making it easier to collect complaints, identify specific places where service and customer care were not as good as they should be, and act upon them accordingly. Supersave is already a highly customer-orientated organisation and he thought our website would be an excellent addition to their customer care effort.

This is all well and good but there still remains the general problem with websites, that there's a lack of access to on-line computers. Surprisingly, in my survey I found that 88 percent of those interviewed had access to the Internet, which I felt was quite high. But this access wasn't always direct for some people it was through their children and grandchildren and neighbours and so on, rather than being readily available in their own homes. This could prove to be a major drawback to the site, but it is still better to have it now to yet the edge over competitors, however slight, and ii the very near future it is expected that almost everyone will have direct access to the Internet.

Another thing to consider is that at the moment I can only base our conclusions on data gathered from a tiny fraction of the supermarket's customer base. In order to get a better idea of how the site is doing and to see how well l have met my objectives, the site will need to have been up and running for at least a few months. After this time, I’ll be possible to see whether or not people are actually using the site, and if it’s helping to make improvements to their customer service.

It would also be interesting to study the effect of the site on staff at the supermarket. Morale could be dented, as more complaints come in. Staff may feel they are being unfairly criticised and that there is no need for another way for customers to complain. But also, the site could boost morale by making staff come together to overcome the constructive criticism, and they may gain more job satisfaction by knowing that they are making a difference to the customer.