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This paper traces the development of a series of Anglo‐German studies on how young adults experience control and exercise personal agency as they pass through periods of transition in education and training, work, unemployment, and in their personal lives. The overarching aim has been to develop an extended dialogue between ideas and evidence to explore the beliefs and actions associated with life‐chances under differing structural and cultural conditions. What kinds of beliefs and perspectives do people have on their future possibilities? How far do they feel in control of their lives? How does people's belief in what is possible for them (their personal horizons developed within cultural and structural influences) determine their behaviours and what they perceive to be “choices”? This research contributes to the re‐conceptualization of agency as a process in which past habits and routines are contextualized and future possibilities envisaged in the contingencies of the present moment. The paper concludes by explaining the concept of “bounded agency” as an alternative to “structured individualization” as a way of understanding the experiences of people in changing social landscapes.

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Approaches to the longstanding challenges of 'integrating' subject-based and work-based knowledge have typically focused on questions of how learning can be 'transferred' from one setting to another, relating the assumed 'abstract' nature of theory to the assumed 'real' nature of practice. This is often seen as a single movement as encapsulated in the term 'from theory to practice'. The authors have developed a fresh approach that concentrates on different forms of knowledge and the ways in which these are contextualised and 're-contextualised' in movements between different sites of learning in colleges and workplaces. While the research has been carried out in a range of professional fields outside nursing, the arguments put forward by the authors are relevant to continuing debates within nursing around the theory-practice gap. The aim has been to explore how the subject-based and work-based aspects of a curriculum or learning programme can articulate with one another more effectively. The potential of the 're-contextualisation' approach for nurse education is outlined, with a view to further research. The original research was sponsored by the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry Commercial Education Trust and the Economic and Social Research Council Teaching and Learning Research Programme.

We examined the nature and timecourse of hemispheric asymmetries in verbal memory by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) in a continuous recognition task. Participants made overt recognition judgments to test words presented in central vision that were either novel (new words) or had been previously presented in the left or right visual field (old words). An ERP memory effect linked to explicit retrieval revealed no asymmetries for words repeated at short and medium retention intervals, but at longer repetition lags (20-50 intervening words) this 'old/new effect' was more pronounced for words whose study presentation had been biased to the right hemisphere (RH). Additionally, a repetition effect linked to more implicit recognition processes (P2 amplitude changes) was observed at all lags for words preferentially encoded by the RH but was not observed for left hemisphere (LH)-encoded words. These results are consistent with theories that the RH encodes verbal stimuli more veridically whereas the LH encodes in a more abstract manner. The current findings provide a critical link between prior work on memory asymmetries, which has emphasized general LH advantages for verbal material, and on language comprehension, which has pointed to an important role for the RH in language processes that require the retention and integration of verbal information over long time spans.

This study explored individual, family, and school-related factors contributing to underachievement among gifted preadolescents. We explored three simple models of factors contributing to underachievement as well as a complex model provided the best fit for the data, yet each of the three simple models was significant, suggesting the importance of an ecological approach to problems of underachievement among gifted students. Intervention approaches deriving from each model were discussed.

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This paper is based on the project ‘Recognition of Tacit Skills and Knowledge in Work Re‐entry’ carried out as a part of the ESRC‐funded Research Network ‘Improving Incentives to Learning in the Workplace’. The network aims to contribute to improved practice among a wide range of practitioners. The study has investigated the part played by tacit forms of personal competences in the education, training and work re‐entry of adult learners. The models of learning produced within this study with the assistance of the Dynamic Concept Analysis method are used to provide a better understanding of individual case studies.