The UK Government's recent emphasis on the graduate workforce raises the profile of work placements within higher education. Anecdotally, the authors find that students on their optional bioscience sandwich degrees benefit academically from placement experience but there is little supportive evidence of this in the literature. To investigate rigorously the link between sandwich placement and academic performance, two cohorts of bioscience students (n = 164) were described in terms of gender (male = 0, female = 1), pre-university qualifications (HESA score), academic performance (%) for each year of degree study (first, second, and final), and mode of study (non-placement = 0, placement = 1). Multiple regression analysis yielded the following predictive equation where all terms were significant: Final % = 28.80 + 2.97 (gender) + 0.14 (HESA score) + 0.44 (Second%) + 3.82 (mode). On average, placement students gain an advantage of nearly 4% in their final year performance. Given that the final year contributes 75% towards degree classification, over a quarter of placement students may benefit from the independent effect of mode of study by crossing a threshold into a higher degree class.

No abstract

The past half century of developmental psychology has moved away from a unidirectional understanding of development (e.g., parents affect children and not vice versa) and toward a bidirectional conceptualization of development. Children are now assumed to affect (Bell, 1968), and even select (Scarr & McCartney, 1983), their environments inasmuch as their environments affect children's behavior. Indeed, key among many ofthe most influential developmental theories in the past several decades is the assumption that children have bidirectional, or reciprocal, relationships with their environments (e.g., Bandura, 1978;Bronfenbrenner, 1986;Lerner, 1991). Sameroff and Chandler (1975) took the idea of reciprocal relations one step further by arguing that children and contexts influence each other mutually over time, such that the change a child precipitates in the environment will change how the environment in tum affects the child at a later time point. The transactional model that they proposed held that children influence their environments to an extent that is commensurate with the influence the environments have on the children (Sameroff & MacKenzie, 2003).

Promoting marriage, especially among low-income single mothers with children, is increasingly viewed as a promising public policy strategy for improving developmental outcomes for disadvantaged children. Previous research suggests, however, that children’s academic achievement either does not improve or declines when single mothers marry. In this paper, we argue that previous research may understate the benefits of mothers’ marriages to children from single-parent families because (1) the short-term and long-term developmental consequences of marriage are not adequately distinguished and (2) child and family contexts in which marriage is likely to confer developmental advantages are not differentiated from those that do not. Using multiple waves of data from the ECLS-K, we find that single mothers’ marriages are associated with modest but statistically significant improvements in their children’s academic achievement trajectories. However, only children from more advantaged single-parent families benefit from their mothers’ marriage.