Support for Freshmen at a Mass-University Program - The Cascaded Blended Mentoring Project

This paper describes a new mentoring project that is being carried out at the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Vienna. The general objective of this project is to help freshmen to manage the demands that come with mass-studies like Psychology. Senior students act as mentors for a group of freshmen by sharing the experiences and knowledge they already gained in their studies. The project is currently in its pilot phase and will start for the main test phase in fall 2007

Viva Survivors – the effect of peer-mentoring on pre-viva anxiety in early-years students

Viva voce exams are used in many disciplines as a test of students’ knowledge and skills. Whilst acknowledged as a useful form of assessment, vivas commonly lead to a great deal of anxiety for students. This anxiety is also apparent for vivas in phonetics, where students must produce and recognise sounds drawn from across the world’s languages, and pervious work has shown that viewing a video of a mock-viva does not reduce this anxiety. To address anxiety prior to phonetics vivas, 63 students, across three cohorts, engaged in a brief, isolated, peer-mentoring session with previously successful students (‘viva survivors’). Anxiety about the viva was measured before and after the mentoring experience, using the short form of the State Trait Anxiety Inventory. There was a significant reduction in anxiety after mentoring, and a significant correlation between anxiety before mentoring and the decrease in anxiety after mentoring. Short-term mentoring is posited as a time- and cost-effective method to decrease viva-related anxiety across disciplines

A Syllabus for the Study of Food Security, Hunger and Poverty

Excerpts: This syllabus is for teaching a course on food security, hunger and poverty. The course outline focuses on US (domestic) and world hunger and food insecurity often the consequence of poverty. The status of childhood hunger and the characteristics of the poor and views about poverty are addressed. The purpose of this course is to add knowledge about hungry, food security and poverty to enhance skills in speaking about and analyzing community situation that foster the quality of public decisions. The curriculum references address concepts, theories, analysis and strategies concerned with the issue of food security. Many Extension professionals have dual appointments that include resident teaching. This syllabus is prepared for use in their situation, as well as for self-study and can be modified for informal adult education