Three exploratory studies are reported which extend the work on approaches to learning carried out by Marton and his colleagues in Gothenburg. The main aim of the studies was to develop a questionnaire to investigate the way students approach the task of reading an academic article. Marton had distinguished between 'deep' and 'surface' approaches, and a coding procedure has been developed to obtain similar categories from questionnaires. These exploratory studies, while not producing statistically convincing results, did confirm the pattern of findings reported by Marton and suggest ways in which his explanatory constructs could be elaborated to take account of the styles of learning adopted by students.Research into the relationships between study methods and academic performance has been carried out at Lancaster since 1968. The first major study was essentially concerned with prediction and was a conventional input-output research design with student characteristics in the first and final years being examined in relation to class of degree. The final report of this study has recently been published as part of Degrees of Excellence: the Academic Achievement Game (Entwistle & Wilson, 1977). Although the correlation analyses showed that only a small proportion of the variance in degree class was predictable in terms of measures of aptitude, study methods and personality, cluster analyses produced more encouraging results. The assumptions of correlational analyses demand uniform sets of relationships and produce a picture of the successful student as intelligent, hard-working, organised, single-minded and introverted. However, such a description is a contradiction of everyday experience. Although such students are found, and they may be the lecturers' 'ideal type', there are many other successful students who could not be classified in this way.

Nurses, diabetes educators and parents should provide developmentally appropriate information about diabetes care and management, scaffolding on existing knowledge. They should provide child-centred contexts in which children and adolescents can freely ask questions about their condition and problem-solve. Programmes that allow young people to develop coping skills and share experiences could also prove beneficial.

This study investigates attitudes toward psychological and physical dating violence among college students in mainland China (n = 245). The results of this study indicate that among our sample of college students in mainland China, men and women were relatively similar in their attitudes toward male perpetrated and female perpetrated physical dating violence and female perpetrated psychological dating violence. As has been found in previous research, men and women in our sample were more accepting of female perpetrated physical and psychological dating violence than male perpetrated physical and psychological dating violence. Finally, among several variables that predicted dating violence attitudes, shame emerged as a potentially important variable to include in future studies on dating violence in Chinese populations.

Existing research consistently connects higher relationship satisfaction with improved psychological and physical functioning. Investigations focusing on relational satisfaction within veterinary medicine have been sparse. This study evaluated 240 veterinary medical students at Kansas State University. Results indicate that students within higher-functioning relationships are more likely to report fewer depressive symptoms, lower stress associated with balancing their school and home lives, less relationship conflict, better physical health, and improved ability to cope with academic expectations, while at the same time experiencing more stress from being behind in studies. Based on these findings, Colleges of Veterinary Medicine (CVMs) are encouraged to institute policies and programs which foster relationship-building for students.

Using dyadic data from 961 married couples from the Relationship Evaluation Questionnaire project, the current study explored the direct association between family of origin climate and marital outcomes and the indirect association via relationship self-regulation (RSR). Results from the actor-partner interdependence model analysis indicated that family of origin climate was positively associated with marital stability directly and indirectly via the effects of RSR and marital satisfaction for both men and women. Results suggest that the experience one has in their family of origin is associated with their marital outcomes through their RSR. Actor-partner direct and indirect effects indicate that spouses' RSR may have important consequences for both partner's evaluation of the marriage. Implications for intervention and future research are discussed.