A key aspect of the student learning experience in higher education takes place through student research projects. Existing research suggests that the supervisor plays a central role in the success of these projects (e.g. Devos, 2007). Current literature concentrates on the qualities of an effective supervisor and much focus is given to setting out guidance on what academics should do in order to become good supervisors (e.g. Lovitts, 2001). Independently, research suggests that students’ characteristics and approaches to learning can have an impact on success (e.g. Busato et al, 2000). Conventionally, the qualities of a “good” supervisor and the qualities of a “good” student are studied separately. No research bridges the gap between these aspects. However, it is proposed that the qualities of the supervisory relationship, and hence the student’s learning experience and the outcomes of the dissertation, depends on a complex interaction between the characteristics, personalities and expectations of both the student and the supervisor. This concept of a ‘match’/‘mismatch’ in terms of psychological factors is novel but has significant implications for higher education. With reference to the central importance of student projects for learning and development the research reported in this thesis concentrates firstly on the student, then on the supervisor and finally on the relationship between them. The thesis is divided into 4 research themes, with the aim of investigating if any psychological factors, of both the student and the supervisor, can predict student success and development during a final year and masters project. The first theme looks at the difference between undergraduate and masters students; the second addresses the characteristics of a “good” student; the third “good” supervision; and finally the 4th theme looks at the interaction between the student and supervisor and investigates the significance of “match” or “mismatch” of psychological factors in supervisor-student partnerships. This final theme considers the qualities of students and supervisors together. Utilising a mixed-methods approach, combining questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, this research investigated pairs of students and supervisors. Data collection occurred in two phases: Student data pre-project and student and supervisor data post project. A total of 580 students and 60 supervisors were surveyed. This was complemented by interviews with 20 students and 10 supervisors. On the basis of the findings it is concluded that there are qualitative differences between undergraduate and masters students in their approaches and attitudes to doing a project; in line with the findings of other research there are characteristics of students which are important for success; and there are some core characteristics of good supervisor; and finally, uniquely this research found that match and mismatch between student and supervisor is important in terms of students’ perceptions of their success and development. It was clear that both the magnitude of difference and direction of the difference, between students and supervisors, had an impact and it seems that certain types of mismatch result in the highest perceptions of success for students. The implications for this research are discussed with a particular focus on higher education.

Managed moves were conceived of as a means of giving a pupil a ‘fresh start’ in another school, often when the pupil is deemed to be at risk of permanent exclusion. Little research on managed moves has been published to date in spite of their prevalence in English and Welsh schools over the past decade. Existing research has largely focused on the views of professionals involved and there has been no published research focusing solely on the perspectives of the pupils who have had managed moves. The aim of this study was to add to the body of psychological research on managed moves through an exploration of pupil experience. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with six Year 10 and 11 pupils who had recently undergone a managed move between mainstream comprehensive schools. Interview transcripts were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). From the interview data, themes for each participant emerged. These led to the identification of four overarching themes occurring across the participant group: the self as vulnerable; the impact of support on the self; identity as a learner; and the need to belong. The findings were discussed in the context of existing literature. Implications for practice for educational psychology services and local authorities were considered, particularly to consider how schools can be supported in understanding factors that may impact on pupils experiencing managed moves and helped to support pupils throughout the process.

The educational attainment of Looked After Children (LAC), particularly in relation to their non-looked after peers, remain poor. The present study sought to further understand the contextual factors and individual mechanisms which act to support or hinder the educational progress of LAC at Key Stage 4. The study operated within a Critical Realist approach and sought the experiences of both LAC and professionals who work to support LAC. In total, eight participants took part in the study. Semi-structured interviews were completed with two LAC participants and six professionals. Both LAC participants were 17 years old and reflected on their experiences of Key Stage 4. Professionals included Virtual School Officers (VSO), a social worker and a Designated Teacher for LAC (DT). The current study utilised Grounded Theory Methodology (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) which allowed the researcher to develop a conceptual understanding of the observed data resulting in an overarching theoretical scheme. The researcher labelled this scheme 'Availability to Engage in Learning' (AEL). The researcher further identified the facilitative and inhibitive contexts and mechanisms which influence AEL. These were then placed in Context Mechanism Outcome models (Pawson & Tilley, 1997) to visually represent the ways in which they impact the educational progress of LAC. Finally, the implications of the findings with regards to the field of Educational Psychology are considered.

This project explores how far subject leaders in British secondary schools are able to promote “leadership for learning” by influencing the professional practice of department members. This area has excited much discussion in the literature in recent years, but little work seems to have looked into departmental inter relationships and their implications for leadership and followership. Using a case study methodology, I investigated over 160 subject leaders and department members from a wide range of schools. Firstly, I distributed questionnaires which probed participants’ approaches while identifying themes for a second stage based around semi-structured interviews. I found that subject leaders are limited in their impact because the organisational structure of schools and the individual nature of teaching restrict the power resources available to them. Although much advocated, collegiality was less evident than informality. This project recommends that the subject leader role be re-calibrated to give its holders access to a broader range of power resources in order to create the conditions in which true collegiality can flourish; such an environment would allow subject leaders to impact positively on the practice of department members to engender effective “leadership for learning”. In arriving at this conclusion, I exploited the gaps in extant literature around the point of intersection between what subject leaders do and how department members respond to it.

This is an evaluative study of an ecological, multi-faceted, multi-levelled school-based mental health and emotional wellbeing project , called the ‘Treasure Project’. The project team directly supported 3,452 children and trained 607 staff from 56 schools. Realistic Evaluation (Pawson & Tilley, 1997) informed the evaluation. Theories, developed from a review of literature, were used to derive a framework of hypotheses about effective work in the area of mental health and emotional wellbeing. Data collected about the project was checked against the framework leading to new theories and hypotheses being developed. Findings from the evaluation suggest that: 1) projects aiming to promote children’s mental health and emotional wellbeing have more impact if they are multi-faceted, multi-levelled and include a whole school approach; 2) direct interventions supporting children’s emotional needs are more effective if school staff’s capacity is simultaneously increased through training and partnership work; and 3) capacity building is most effective when it takes place over time, is aimed at building staff’s support skills, and is rooted in evidence-based approaches providing good resources for future reference. The enquiry’s limitations are discussed, together with a consideration of how these findings might useful to professionals, including educational psychologists, working in partnership with schools.

The present study examines the use of group supervision with Family Support Workers (FSWs) based in Children’s Centres, suggests key mechanisms and context features for consideration when implementing group supervision and highlights future directions for research. Literature on the role Educational Psychologists hold in Children’s Centres is reviewed and a role utilising community, critical and organisational psychology principles is suggested. The present study uses a Realistic Evaluation (Pawson & Tilley, 1997) framework to explore the mechanisms, context and outcomes of group supervision. Key mechanisms within FSWs were: confidence, openness to ideas, experience of the job and supervision, prioritisation of group supervision and relationships with colleagues. Key mechanisms within group supervision were: the professional contract, group working agreement, supervisor role, size and composition of the group. Key features of the context were management support and group dynamics. The present study discusses outcomes of group supervision in light of the literature, finding positive outcomes outweigh the number and frequency of negative outcomes, supporting previous literature and raising additional outcomes. The outcomes were coded into educative, supportive and managerial functions (Hawkins & Shohet, 2006). The educative outcomes were: learning from others, sharing experiences and problems, gaining ideas, strategies and new perspectives. The supportive outcomes were: reduced isolation, raised confidence, reassurance, supporting team relationships and individuals. The managerial outcomes were group supervision supported FSWs in delivering better outcomes for children and families.

The current thesis aimed to explore potential contributing factors to the difficulty that young children may experience with moving past previously effective word learning strategies. The particular focus of this thesis was how children overcome an early tendency to focus on perceptual features as their basis for word meaning and the potentially greater difficulty that children may experience with linking words to relational concepts. These aims were explored through a series of experiments that looked at 2- to 5-year-olds’ extensions of words (e.g. nouns, noun-noun compounds, verbs). Findings suggest: that children’s difficulty with correctly attributing meaning to words which are primarily defined by relations is truly due to their relational nature and not their dynamic nature; that children’s tendency to base word meanings on relations can be increased by explicitly highlighting the relation; that comparisons across more than one exemplars can help children attribute verb meaning to actions alone instead of an object-action combination; that inhibition ability may be a contributing factor in children’s ability to overcome their focus on perceptual features when understanding word meaning; and that children with autism spectrum disorders may not make use of some processes that typically developing children employ to move beyond basing word meaning on shared perceptual features.

This thesis presented ten experiments investigating the role of working memory and long-term memory in forming, storing and using representations of what is known (i.e., common ground) among people engaged in communication. Chapter 1 provided a general review of common ground and perspective-taking effects in referential communication. Chapters 2 and 3 examined how memory loads and memory capacities constrain adults and children’s ability to use a speaker’s perspective in language comprehension. Experiment 1 employed eye-tracking with adult participants, and indicated dissociable roles of working memory and long-term in perspective encoding and perspective integration. Experiments 2-3 observed an age-related improvement in the use of perspective information in language comprehension between 8- and 10-year-olds. Chapters 5 and 6 explored whether effects of common ground could be achieved via a low-level memory-based mechanism reviewed in Chapter 4, without necessarily going though explicit inferences about perspectives. Experiments 4-7 tested whether partner-specific effects could be achieved via memory associations between conversational partners and referents. Experiments 8-10 explored whether an object being in common ground or privileged ground during a preceding discourse would influence people’s memory for this object. Finally, Chapter 7 provided a brief general discussion of the findings, and suggested some potential future directions.

Educational research has emphasised the importance of emotional intelligence, epistemic beliefs and academic intrinsic motivation to the teaching and learning process, with a large number of studies focusing on these areas in different contexts and at different levels of education. The contribution the present study makes to this scholarship is threefold: firstly, it fills a gap in the literature by exploring these constructs with students enrolled on teacher education courses. Secondly, the research is conducted in the context of Pakistan, where there is a paucity of educational research concerning these three constructs. This thesis argues that attention to these three significant elements of the teaching and learning process are neglected in Pakistani teacher education institutions, and thus paying attention to them may improve the quality of education in the country. Furthermore, the third contribution made by this study is its exploration of all three constructs in relation to some basic demographic variables and in investigating how the emotional intelligence scores and epistemological beliefs scores of Pakistani student teachers might relate to their academic intrinsic motivation. This extends the findings from previous research, which has tended to explore these constructs individually, and has not explored the concepts in the Pakistani teacher education context. The main aims of the present study are to explore (a) the relationship of emotional intelligence, epistemic beliefs and academic intrinsic motivation with demographic variables such as gender, age, previous area of study and previous highest educational qualification; (b) the relationship between student teachers’ epistemic beliefs and their academic intrinsic motivation; and (c) the relationship between the emotional intelligence and the academic intrinsic motivation of prospective teachers. The study used questionnaires to collect data from 617 prospective teachers in Pakistan. The questionnaire gathered basic data on four demographics variables: gender, age, previous area of study and previous educational highest qualification. The questionnaire also included a measure for each of the three constructs of emotional intelligence, epistemic beliefs and academic intrinsic motivation. The thesis begins by setting out the context of teacher education in Pakistan, arguing that the quality of education in Pakistan would be enhanced by greater attention to developing student teachers’ understanding of emotional intelligence, epistemic beliefs and academic intrinsic motivation, and how these constructs impact on their teaching as well as on students’ learning. The thesis also reviews the international literature specifically regarding the three constructs, setting out the background of each of these constructs and discussing how they have been studied in the context of educational research. The review of the literature finds that while these constructs are highly significant in educational research, they have not been extensively studied in the context of a) teacher education, b) Pakistan, and c) how emotional intelligence and epistemic beliefs dimensions predict or relate to academic intrinsic motivation dimensions. The current findings indicated that student teachers had high attributes related to emotional intelligence and academic intrinsic motivation compared to epistemic beliefs. For gender analysis in relation to the three measures, more significant results were found regarding emotional intelligence and epistemic beliefs. The age analysis in relation to the three constructs did not indicate many statistically significant differences. Differences based on the previous areas of studies of the research participants and the three constructs indicated some significant differences. The differences based on education level in relation to the three measures indicated significant results on two measures namely: academic intrinsic motivation and epistemic beliefs, however the results were very inconsistent. The analysis of the relationship between epistemic beliefs and academic intrinsic motivation revealed significant results on three dimensions, from which two were positively linked with academic intrinsic motivation dimensions. The analysis of the relationship between the emotional intelligence of student teachers and their academic intrinsic motivation revealed that all the emotional intelligence dimensions were positively linked with academic intrinsic motivation dimensions. In comparison, emotional intelligence appears to be a better predictor of academic intrinsic motivation compared to epistemological beliefs, as there were more significant results and positive associations between the dimensions of emotional intelligence and academic intrinsic motivation. Overall, the study highlights the significance of the development of emotional intelligence and epistemic beliefs of student teachers in the context of Pakistan. It is advisable that teacher education institutions in the country should focus on these areas. Finally, recommendations related to the study are presented for the attention of teacher education institutions.

Research and recent policy developments in the education of children with special educational needs highlight the need for both greater involvement of parents and pupils in determining how pupil needs are met, and increased accountability of educational psychology services, particularly in demonstrating the impact interventions have on clients, namely children and young people. The research aimed to explore the impact of consultation in relation to four areas, namely teachers’ perceptions of their ability to make a difference with regard to progress of the pupils about whom they are concerned; parental perceptions of whether consultation had made a difference to their child’s subsequent progress; pupil perceptions of whether/how actions undertaken following EPs’ consultation with school staff and/or their parents had made a difference to their progress; and what educational psychologists considered to be the key factors enabling consultation to contribute to pupil progress. The educational psychologists used consultation in school with teachers, using Target Monitoring and Evaluation (TME) in order to set targets and monitor progress. Semi-structured interviews were carried out in order to ascertain perceptions regarding the consultation process. Findings suggest that although consultation is perceived as a helpful approach by EPs and those to whom they offered consultation, review and further development of the Service approach to consultation is needed to ensure the greater involvement of parents and pupils in determining and monitoring targets set.