This article describes the main findings of a study of youth theatre commissioned by the National Association of Youth Theatres (NAYT), funded by Arts Council England (ACE) and carried out by the Centre for Applied Theatre Research (CATR). The study explored the impact of taking part in youth theatre on young people's personal and social…

From a life-stage perspective, the purpose of this study was to examine the motivation of female students in midlife to enroll in an undergraduate or graduate program and the meaning they attach to higher education (HE) in general. An additional purpose was to reveal these women's subjective perceptions of the benefits they gained from HE at this…

This chapter provides a broad overview of the benefits attained by SI leaders as a result of their participation in SI leadership activities.

The rapid growth in the number of older adult learners presents new challenges and opportunities for adult educators. These include facilitating the development of individuals as they make the transition to their later years and of American society as it struggles to reenvision aging.

In this paper, we explore the rationale, process and outcomes of the Regional Interoperability Project on Progression for Lifelong Learning, a project that established a model of cross-sector collaboration in personal development planning technology in the UK. With specific reference to the widening participation agenda, and grounded in the…

A selective literature review of publications on life review generated ideas on implementation, theory, research, and therapy. The review begins by differentiating life review from reminiscence, and summarizing ways to conduct a life review. A dozen theories that have been influenced by the life review technique are presented, with a focus placed…

This article considers university staff's place in students' worlds from a psychodynamic perspective. It looks at "studenthood" as a psychological stage, in which relationship to university and university staff is seen as being recruited into a personal developmental context. It sketches some psychodynamic background for understanding the role…

To meet ordinary pre-school expectations, a child has to have acquired the ability to focus and attend to another person and to engage easily and warmly--exchanging simple, friendly gestures, smiles, head nods, emotional expressions, and meaningful sounds. He or she must be able to communicate, show another person what she wants and take the next…

This article, using a controlled design, reports the results of an exploratory study to investigate the impact of two types of intervention strategies (cognitively vs. emotionally focused) on two types of identity processes (self-construction and self-discovery) in a culturally diverse sample of 90 emerging adult university students. A…

Research over the past two decades has demonstrated that individuals are better at recognizing and discriminating faces of their own race versus other races. The own-race effect has typically been investigated in relation to recognition memory; however, some evidence supports an own-race effect at the level of perceptual encoding in adults. The…

When a behavior disappears and then resurfaces, developmental psychologists typically look more closely at the behavior to figure out what is different before and after--that is, they increase the grain with an eye toward discovering how the system that generates that behavior has changed. But what ought to count as a U-shaped phenomenon? How…

There is so much quarrelling surrounding education today it seems people have lost sense of what needs arguing about, where there is a need for more research and where there are grounds for general agreement. Grounds now exist for shared agreement on matters of educational purpose. Moreover, there has in fact been much agreement on such matters…

This study explored internship practices in family studies programs in the United States. Specifically, procedures, supervision, purpose, benefits, integration with coursework, and evaluation were examined. Data were collected via a questionnaire e-mailed to universities and colleges with undergraduate family studies programs (N = 68). Although…

Students who do not fit the definition of the traditional student are becoming an increasingly large segment of the college population. In order to effectively promote retention in today's college students, the student development professional must understand these changing demographic and academic characteristics. This study compared student…

The present study used meta-analytic techniques (number of samples = 92) to determine the patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course. Results showed that people increase in measures of social dominance (a facet of extraversion), conscientiousness, and emotional stability, especially in young adulthood (age 20 to…