Understanding the Influence of Women’s Education on Their Autonomy: Evidence From a Less Developed Area in Pakistan

Women’s autonomy or ability to make decisions is determined by several factors, education is one of them. In this paper, we have checked the association of women’s education with their autonomy. We have considered how women’s education influences the decisions regarding their marriage, participation in family’s decisions, access to healthcare facilities and management of finances in the family. From a randomly selected cluster of neighbourhoods/muhallas in Jacobabad city, we purposively selected 391 married women from different households for testing four hypotheses. Results reveal that education played a positive role in the women’s lives by enhancing their participation in the family’s power distribution. Women with graduate level education performed better in the family’s power distribution than women with primary or secondary level education. The women with graduate level education were asked their consent for marriage, had more frequent participation in family’s decisions and visited healthcare facilities more often. However, these women also had limited control over the family’s finances, which shows that educated women too do not have complete autonomy in managing and controlling household finances, which can empower them and enhance their status in the family.

Student-to-Student Communication in Online Graduate-Level Education Courses

In 2014, nearly one million graduate students were enrolled in online courses (Allen & Seaman, 2016), with many of the courses requiring discussions that contributed to students' overall course grades. In this chapter, the author discusses student-to-student communication in online graduate level education courses. Specifically, the author reviews literature salient to online discussions and utilizes original research from three courses in the Spring 2015 term taught by the author to discuss effective practices to increase student-to-student communication. These techniques include creating social presence, establishing discussion criteria, establishing the number of posts, utilizing self-assessment to assist students in creating posts, and student facilitation of discourse.

A study on graduate level education in architecture: Case of Turkey

Today, there are 41 universities offering graduate education programs in architecture. Those programs cover a number of different topics including architectural conservation and restoration, architectural restoration, architectural design, informatics in architectural design, architectural planning and design, architecture history, architectural history and theory, architecture and built environment, digital design in architecture and production. The council of higher education presents that 2978 master theses submitted and approved by Council of higher education. In this study, the master theses submitted to the graduate programs have been investigated. Matrix has been developed regarding o the sex, language, topics, universities. The types of graduate school are natural science and social science. The results of the study show that the number of female students is higher than the male students. The number of theses in Turkish is increasing. The increasing number of theses investigating build technology builds physics and building and construction and computational design is of importance. It is possible to determine that the current and popular topics of Turkish graduate programs in Architecture are in parallel with the prevailing agenda of World architecture. Key Words: theses in architecture, graduate level education, architectural education.

Addressing "Who Are You as a Scholarly Professional?" Through Artful and Creative Engagement

This work o ers examples and discussion of the work of participants in a graduate- level education course where creative engagement and meaningful learning through artful inquiry were pursued in addressing the question, "Who are you as a scholarly professional?" We provide a brief description of the nature of coursework, followed by descriptions of participants’ work, and the authors’ experiences as graduate student and instructor in creating a Visual Journal and conducting the experience, respectively. There is a discussion of the motivations, challenges, and outcomes experienced by the authors as they seek to create meaningful and transformative learning experiences for themselves and others.

Graduate Students Reference Open Access Content in Literature Review Assignments

A Review of: Allen, E. J., & Weber, R. A. (2014). The library and the web: Graduate students’ selection of open access journals for empirical literature searches. Journal of Web Librarianship, 8(3), 243-262. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19322909.2014.927745 Abstract Objective – This study seeks to understand to what degree education graduate students cite open access, peer-reviewed journals in their coursework and whether patterns of open access referencing change over time. Design – Longitudinal reference list analysis. Setting – Public university in the United States of America. Subjects – Reference lists collected from final literature review papers in a graduate-level education class (n = 382). Methods – The authors collected reference lists from final literature review papers in a graduate-level education class for a nine-year time frame from the 2005 to 2013 academic years. The authors analyzed 2,594 reference entries from the 382 reference lists in the sample. The authors organized reference entries into spreadsheets for analysis, creating one spreadsheet per class section and sorting references by type (e.g., book, journal article, website, etc.) and source. The authors also created a cumulative list of journal titles that they analyzed for open access status and how often the journals appeared in the sample. Other information collected about each journal included "ISSNs, national origin, journal sponsorship, frequency and years of student usage, presence of empirical research, [and] peer review status" (p. 249). Finally, the authors organized open access journals into the following four categories based on their access method: • Category A "OA Platform and Publisher" • Category B "Publisher Only" • Category C "Delay or Hybrid from Host or Publisher" • Category D "Subscription Based, but Self Archived" (p. 249) Main Results – A total of 594 unique journals appeared in reference lists over the study period, and 11.5% (n=68) of the total were open access journals. Of the open access journals, 96% (n=65) included original research articles, and the majority (n=51) fell into Category A "OA Platform and Publisher." Nine, six, and two journal titles fell into categories B, C, and D, respectively. The authors found no pattern or change in the use of open access titles during the nine-year study period. Open access journals appeared in reference lists an average of 14 times per year with the highest usage observed in 2009. Conclusion – The results show that graduate students in the sample used a range of open access journals. The presence of open access resources in reference lists signals that students may use both library subscription databases and open web search tools to complete their literature review assignments. The authors suggest potential reasons why open access use did not grow during the study period, including a possible mismatch between student research interests and the topics present in open access titles, the lack of discussion about open access publishing during library instruction, or student satisfaction with the resources provided through library-sponsored subscriptions. Librarians are encouraged to include high-quality open access resources within their catalogues or other electronic resources to increase open access discoverability and to include popular open web search tools as a means to retrieve open access materials during information literacy instruction.