Boys suffer while girls flourish when learning with the brightest

Boys suffer academically when surrounded by high-achievers at school while girls benefit, according to new LSE research.

The five-a-side football challenge

Following last year's success, the Office of Development and Alumni Relations is issuing a new challenge this year to any department at LSE for a five-a-side football match.

Dr Peter Howlett

Dr Howlett, Department of Economic History, is a long suffering Leeds United fan but also enjoys music and films - he spent a week last year watching 21 films at the London Film Festival.

Message from Professor Janet Hartley (pictured), pro-director for teaching and learning.

Many of you will have participated in the Lent term teaching surveys. I have now received the results, and overall they are heartening.

There were over 13,000 responses to the class/seminar surveys. The average score for the question 'In general, how satisfied have you been so far with the teaching on this course by this teacher?' was 1.7 (on a five-point scale with 1 being ‘very satisfied’). This is in line with last year’s result. Only 4.5 per cent of students indicated dissatisfaction with any of their class/seminar teaching, and 84 per cent were satisfied/very satisfied.

There were over 11,000 responses to the lecture survey. The average score for the question, 'Overall, how would you rate the performance of this lecturer?' was 1.9. Again, this is in line with last year’s result. 6.2 per cent of students indicated dissatisfaction with at least some of their lecturing, while 78.8 per cent were satisfied/very satisfied.

New chair of the Graduate School Board of Examiners announced

Professor David Marsden, vice chair of the Academic Board and chair of the Academic Nominations Committee, has announced that Dr Jennifer Jackson-Preece (pictured), European Institute, has been appointed as chair of the Graduate School Board of Examiners.
 

Students and staff were in for a treat yesterday when a selection of farmyard animals arrived on campus.

The petting zoo event was organised by the LSESU, as part of their ‘De-stress Fest’, in an attempt to help students de-stress during the exam period. The event was also enjoyed by staff, members of the public and children from the LSE nursery.

The animals, which included a donkey, a pony, goats, pigs, ducks, rabbits, guinea pigs and some chickens, travelled all the way from Leicestershire for their visit to LSE. While holding a rabbit, one student remarked: ‘I feel 100 per cent more relaxed than I did 10 minutes ago. This was such a good idea!’

Since the last edition of Staff News, more staff members have got in touch to tell us how they are getting involved in the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games:

• Marsha Fu, Department of Social Policy, is volunteering as a member of the Communications Team for the British Red Cross during the Olympics, and may do some first aid duties as well.
• Andrew Wright, LSE Careers, is volunteering as a London ambassador in Covent Garden and also as a Games Maker at ExCeL.

Four LSE students attended the British Conference of Undergraduate Research at the University of Warwick last month and presented the winning papers from 2011’s LSE GROUPS project, run by the Teaching and Learning Centre.

‘We were asked many interesting questions about our presentation [on the impact of the Olympic-related housing programme on the sustainability of the local community in east London] and it was great to learn about recent discoveries and be able to contribute to others' research,’ said Malika Bouazzaoui. Her co-presenter Jiazhe Zhu added: ‘There were presentations from many different disciplines. I was especially impressed by a PhD student who talked about his own experience of undergraduate research.’ The team also included Aditi Gupta, Alisa Popova, Naxin Wangy, and Sam Williams.

The other group's paper, written by Michelle Kalus, Monica Kaminska, Alyssa Nam, Andrew Nicolau, Stavros Stavrikkos, and Tam Trinh, centred on the role of information, education and incentive in the successful implementation of environmental policies across London universities. Conference attendee Tam said: ‘The audience expressed great interest in the topic as well as the way it was presented.’ Fellow presenter Stavros added: ‘It was a great experience and it really widened our knowledge about undergraduate research in the UK.’

Real Soft Power - Modelling the Great Shift East

On Wednesday 25 April, the LSE Alumni Association Singapore hosted a fashion party entitled 'Real Soft Power - Modelling the Great Shift East'.

The event brought together leaders from the creative, fashion, media and modelling industries, with special guests including LSE professor Danny Quah and supermodel Philippa Lett.

Professor Quah said: 'Great energy and interest from the audience as planet-scale macro and ground-level reality converged - economic models are for everyone, I thought to myself at one point.'
 

Academic abroad

Professor Mark Schankerman (pictured) has organised an international conference on 'Patents, Entrepreneurship and Innovation' at the US Patents and Trademarks Office in Washington DC on 3-4 May.

Professor Schankerman will also be giving one of the talks at the conference, entitled 'Strategic Patenting and Software Innovation'. Other guests include Eric Maskin, 2007 winner of the Nobel prize in economics.

Professor Schankerman is also giving an invited talk at the OECD in Paris at an international workshop, Patent Practice and Innovation, on 10-11 May.

New Students’ Centre construction phase meeting

Capital Development and Geoffrey Osborne invite LSE staff and students to a New Students’ Centre construction phase meeting on Thursday 10 May from 1-2pm or 5-6pm in room KSW 1.01, 20 Kingsway.

The meeting will include:

• A look at what has been completed
• Problems and solutions:
  - Dust control
  - Noise control
  - Traffic control
• Update on considerate construction initiatives
• Communication
• Ongoing project time scales

Register now for LSE Teaching Day 2012

The fourth annual LSE Teaching Day will be held on Tuesday 22 May.

The main speech will be given by Professor Amos Witztum, Department of Management, on 'Higher Education: what has gone wrong?'.

Professor Janet Hartley, pro-director for teaching and learning, will open the day. The programme includes 17 parallel sessions organised under four strands.

The day will close with a debate discussing the relevance of student surveys and the presentation of LSE teaching prize winners at a wine reception.

For more information, visit LSE Teaching Day.
 

From April, both of LSE's UK and overseas mail providers have increased their prices.

On average UK prices have gone up 24 per cent and overseas 10 per cent:

• DL and C5 = 2nd class 33p per letter
• DL and C5 = 1st class 46p per letter
• A4 = 2nd class 57p per letter
• A4 = 1st class 70p per letter
• Overseas rest-of-world mail is now £7.59 per kg
• Overseas European mail is now £9.11 per kg

Please consider folding A4 paper (up to four sheets) into a C5 envelope. This is more cost effective and is also better for the School's carbon footprint.

Moodle Upgrade - CLT announcement

Over the last two years, the Centre for Learning Technology (CLT) has been planning and testing an upgrade to Moodle, which will happen at the end of June, so that upgraded Moodle will be fully functional for the 2012-13 academic year.

CLT ran a pilot with 16 courses on an upgraded Moodle server in Lent term. If you would like a preview of what the new Moodle will look like, visit http://m2.lse.ac.uk/, or email clt-support@lse.ac.uk if you would like to try it out.

CLT has introduced the upgrade on various occasions and a further demonstration will be part of the Teaching Day programme.

Moodle will look better, function better and contain new features and important improvements. Students, editors and teachers should find new Moodle prettier, more functional and more navigable.

The upgrade will mean a comfortable transition to an improved version of the same thing, and not a move to a different system. Most importantly, none of your work on current Moodle will be lost or need duplication. New Moodle will look different, but most functions will be familiar to current users.

For more information, visit Moving to new Moodle.
 

The award of an Honorary Fellowship is one of the most prestigious awards that the School can bestow. The Court may elect as an Honorary Fellow of LSE any member of the School whose achievements are of conspicuous merit, or any person including members of the School who has rendered outstanding service to the School.

Honorary Fellows need to have a direct link with the School, but must not be a current student, member of staff or a member of the Council.

Want to find out more about environmental issues at LSE? Want to gain the skills and knowledge associated with environmental auditing?

Green Impact LSE is looking for staff and students to volunteer to visit departments around the School and conduct audits on the Green Impact team workbooks. Each volunteer auditor will be fully trained on the criteria and what they need to audit through a half-day training session. In pairs, auditors will then complete one or more audit. An audit should take between one and two hours to complete depending on the size of the department.

Training and auditing will take place on Friday 1 June from 10am-4.30pm in room CON 1.04. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

LSE - Sciences Po Faculty Mobility Scheme

LSE and Sciences Po have launched a scheme which gives academics the chance to spend up to three months teaching at the other institution, from the 2012-13 academic year.

The scheme aims to help meet teaching needs and to develop further the exchange of ideas and expertise.

To make the scheme as flexible as possible there are two options: for a one month visit and for longer visits of three months. Each option includes minimum requirements for teaching students and for advising PhD candidates.

Participants will continue to receive their normal salary and a travel grant from their home institution. They will also receive a subsistence allowance or salary from the host institution.

The School is pleased to advise that it has negotiated a special agreement with Club Quarters, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, for overnight stays or for longer.

Visit the Finance Division website to view the benefits and attractive rates.

Club Quarters at 61 Lincoln's Inn Fields
LSE staff, their families and guests may use Club Quarters for personal overnight stays, weddings and special events at LSE at these rates or lower.

LSE staff should book by phone, 020 7451 5800, or by email at e_memberservices@clubquarters.com. Please provide your employee number followed by the first 11 letters of your name. Your employee number can be easily found on your monthly salary slip at 'LSE for You'. This information is required for invoice identification purposes only. Your department will be invoiced for the stay.

LSE associates and families etc, should visit www.clubquarters.com/MemberHome.php to make their booking and payment by credit card. Please enter 'LSE' in the comments box.

Following last year's success, the Office of Development and Alumni Relations (ODAR) is issuing a new challenge this year to any department at LSE for a five-a-side football match.

If your department is interested, contact Bo Ruan at b.ruan@lse.ac.uk or on ext 5340.

May's LSE Perspectives gallery is now online. You can view the gallery online here.

The gallery features 12 striking images submitted by LSE staff and students. Each image reflects a unique perspective on a particular scene.

If you have taken any artistic images on your travels, from your home town or even just here in London why not submit them for LSE perspectives so that they can be shared with the LSE community.

Urban Vignettes - capture your city

A group of LSE postgraduate students have launched Urban Vignettes, a collaborative visual-based blog funded by Urban@LSE, which captures the different ways people experience, negotiate and engage with city life as the world undergoes the largest period of urban growth in history.

The team is inviting contributors, both regular and/or occasional, to respond to its 'Capture Your City' campaign. Send a sample image that captures something special about your city, and 300-500 words explaining why your city deserves the spotlight for our inaugural season, to submit@urbanvignettes.com.

House swap available

An American academic, who will be visiting LSE and London from 4-22 September, is looking for someone who might be interested in a house swap during the period.

Her house is a three bedroom townhouse in Santa Monica, California, situated on a quiet street just 16 blocks from the beach. The house would be suitable for three or four people. Local shops are within walking distance and there are direct buses to UCLA and downtown Los Angeles.

For more information, click here.
 

More for less - take advantage of special offers for LSE staff

I Need Pampering is offering LSE staff and their family members an amazing 80 per cent off hair and beauty treatments at three London salons.

Millionhairs in Southgate, London
Extensive pamper pack, usually priced at £350, is available to LSE staff for just £57. Simply enter MIL80 at the checkout.

Corinne & Co at the InterContinental Hotel on Park lane, London
Hair and beauty experience, usually priced at £400, is available to LSE staff for just £55. Simply enter COR80 at the checkout.

B-Beauty Professional, Harrow
Spa experience, usually priced at £400, is available to LSE staff for just £59.99. Simply enter BB80 at the checkout.

This week Nigel Stead, the School photographer, has been out and about taking pictures for the new LSE Prospectus. This one is of Paul Day's nine metre high sculpture 'The Meeting Place' at St Pancras International terminal. The original brief stipulated that ‘it must emphasise the romantic nature of train travel.’
For more images like this, visit the Photography Unit.

Systems of financial support for poorer students applying to university are confusingly complex and involve dramatic 'cliff-edges' where help for the marginally better-off suddenly disappears, new analysis has found.

The study, published by LSE's Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE), analyses the means-tested bursaries and fee reductions that the largest 52 universities have offered to students applying to start in the autumn, when fees will increase to up to £9,000 per year.

John Hills, director of CASE, who led the study, said: 'As cuts have collided with attempts to protect the poorest, combined with a move to more ‘localised’ decision-making, we are seeing a move back towards lower-level institutions designing their own means-tests. But this case study suggests that the end result can be overlapping systems that are complex, very hard to compare, and have undesirable side-effects.' More
 

Uprisings across the Middle East have not led to any significant shifts towards permanent democracy even where they have toppled dictators, a new report warns.

Instead new elites have emerged with clear ties to the old discredited regimes (as in Egypt and Libya) or existing regimes look like surviving, battered but intact (as in Syria and Bahrain), concludes the analysis from LSE IDEAS.

The report, After the Arab Spring: power shift in the Middle East?, looked for evidence of genuine power shifts in the region but found no sign that true revolution has occurred.

Boys suffer academically when surrounded by high achievers at school while girls benefit, according to new research from LSE.

Published in the latest edition of the Journal of Labor Economics, the research shows that brighter boys in particular are negatively affected by studying with a larger proportion of brilliant peers at school. In contrast the researchers found that girls, and especially those who are less able, benefit from studying with more intelligent school mates.

Felix Weinhardt, one of the researchers, said: 'We’d love to know why boys and girls respond so differently when they are faced with academically very bright schoolmates. Although there is some research that shows that girls are more positively influenced by peers and social interactions we don’t know if that is the effect that we are seeing here.'

Research e-Briefing

Click here to read the April edition of the Research Division newsletter.

To sign up for research news, recent funding opportunities, research awards that are about to start, and examples of research outcomes, click here.

The next issue is out at the end of May 2012. More

How Can European Migration Policies Promote Development
On: Wednesday 23 May at 1pm in the Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building
Speaker: Tobias Billström (pictured), Swedish minister for migration and asylum policy, and Peter Sutherland, chairman of the LSE Court of Governors and United Nations special representative for migration.

Plus two screenings as part of the London International Documentary Festival 2012:

Shadows of Liberty
On: Thursday 24 May from 7-9pm in the Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
Speakers: Charlie Beckett, director of POLIS, Pratap Chatterjee, executive director of CorpWatch, Guardian contributor and board member of Amnesty International and the Corporate Europe Observatory, and Jean-Phillipe Tremblay, director of Shadows of Liberty.
LSE staff and students can request one ticket via the online ticket request form after 10pm on Tuesday 15 May.

Other events include....

Fuel on the Fire: oil and politics in Iraq
On: Tuesday 8 May at 6.30pm in the New Theatre, East Building
Speaker: Greg Muttitt, campaigns and policy director at War on Want and the author of Fuel on the Fire: oil and politics in occupied Iraq.

Dial M for Murdoch
On: Wednesday 9 May at 6.30pm in the Old Theatre, Old Building
Speakers: Martin Hickman, news editor at The Independent, and Tom Watson, MP for West Bromwich East.

Adding Value In Africa: some reflections from the grandson of a Ghanaian cocoa farmer
On: Thursday 10 May at 6.30pm in the Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
Speaker: Lord Boateng, British high commissioner to South Africa from 2005-09 and the UK's first black cabinet minister.
 

On: Tuesday 8 May from 12.45-1.45pm in the Graham Wallas Room, Old Building
Speakers: Professor Colin Dayan, Robert Penn Warren Professor in the humanities at Vanderbilt University, and Dr Sharon Shalev, fellow at LSE's Mannheim Centre for Criminology and a researcher at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford.

The prison is the central public institution in the United States. Though hidden from sight, it defines the public in profound ways.

Nowhere is the curbing of life and the categorising of persons more extreme than in the Supermax prison - the newest weapon in America's punitive armoury. Prison practices there are ever more refined, torturous, and invisible, and this legal disposal is key to the ongoing exclusion of the poor and those considered racially suspect.

On: Wednesday 9 May at 3pm in the Thai Theatre, New Academic Building
Speaker: David White, University of Oxford

The Centre for Learning Technology presents the fourth 'NetworkED: Technology in Education' seminar.

Students are busy developing their own approaches to learning which take advantage of the abundance of information and new forms of collaboration online. Many of their ad hoc strategies are highly effective but are nevertheless frowned upon by an educational establishment, which is struggling to adapt to the implications of the web.

Drawing on findings from the Digital Visitors and Residents project, David White will discuss how the sheer convenience of the web is shifting what it means to learn (and to teach) back towards critical and creative thinking.

The event is open to LSE staff and research students. To book a place, visit the Training and Development System.

Podcasts of public lectures and events

What About Women in London?
Speakers: Victoria Borwick, Jenny Jones, Ken Livingstone, and Brian Paddick
Recorded: Monday 23 April, approx 100 minutes
Click here to listen

Tiger Head, Snake Tails: China today, how it got there and where it is heading
Speaker: Jonathan Fenby
Recorded: Tuesday 24 April, approx 87 minutes
Click here to listen

The Civil Service
Speaker: Lord O'Donnell
Recorded: Thursday 26 April
Click here to listen

Training for staff

Courses scheduled for next week include:

• PGCertHE - Portfolio Building

• Moodle Basics Training

• Coping with Stress

• Going beyond Google: advanced use of the internet

• Getting the Most from Meetings

• Twitter and hashtags: participating online at conferences and events

For a full listing of what is available and further details, including booking information, see www.lse.ac.uk/training.
 

Below are some of the vacancies currently being advertised to internal candidates only, as well as those being advertised externally.

• Conference manager, LSE Cities
• Deputy head of alumni relations (maternity cover), ODAR: alumni relations
• Development associate (maternity cover), ODAR: major gift fundraising
• Electrician, Residential and Catering Services Division
• LSE fellow in government (two posts), Government
• LSE fellow in urban and development geography, Geography and Environment
• LSE100 class teacher (GTA), LSE100 The LSE Course
• LSE100 teaching fellow, LSE100 The LSE Course
• Lecturer in social psychology/organisational psychology, Social Psychology
• MSc management and exchanges programme manager, Management
• Pensions manager, HR Services
• Programme office manager, IT Services: MIS
• Research officer, PSSRU
• Research officer (GIS/data analysis), LSE Cities
• Web producer (corporate websites), Communications
• Widening participation manager (maternity cover), ARD: student recruitment

Nicole wants to hear from you!

Do you have some news, an achievement, or an aspect of LSE life that you would like to share? If so, then I would love to hear from you, contact me at n.gallivan@lse.ac.uk or on ext 7582.

The next edition of Staff News is on Thursday 10 May. Articles for this should be emailed to me by Tuesday 8 May. Staff News is emailed every Thursday during term time and fortnightly during the holidays.