This paper considers the effect of how children pass time before entrance to school on attainment in primary school. We find in NCDS data that children perform marginally better at seven and eleven if they spent time with their mother, or at a pre-school, rather than in informal care. This holds when one controls for parental education, social class, and assessed parental interest in the child’...

This paper reports an assessment on a physical informal learning environment at a public university in Malaysia. The physical aspects investigated were the space conditions and utilisation that support informal learning activities undertaken by students outside their formal lecture hours. The research was conducted to understand how existing university facilities accommodate informal learning, ...

The evolution of new technology and its increasing use, has for some years been making the existence of informal learning more and more transparent, especially among young and older adults in both Higher Education and workplace contexts. However, the nature of formal and non-formal, coursebased, approaches to learning has made it hard to accommodate these informal processes satisfactorily. The ...

Video recording is increasingly used in higher education settings to help students develop their oral presentation skills. However, little is known about the effect of video review for bringing about better high school student outcomes in oral presentation in formal (classroom) and informal (out-of-classroom) settings. Using a quasi-experimental design, this study investigated the effectiveness...

BACKGROUND Previous studies on informal patient payments have mostly focused on the magnitude and determinants of these payments while the attitudes of health care actors towards these payments are less well known. This study aims to reveal the attitudes of Hungarian health care consumers towards informal payments to provide a better understanding of this phenomenon. METHODS For the analysis,...

Physicians achieve parts of their knowledge informally on the Internet. In a first study we analyzed the quality of online content of prenatal screening and diagnosis on elements like Wikipedia, Twitter or YouTube. Furthermore, own content was published on blogs, forums and static pages, and visitor's data was measured. The second study consists of three surveys among physicians: Doctors use pu...

the study investigated the loan repayment, its determinants and socio-economic characteristics of microfinance loan beneficiaries in the southeast states of nigeria. it was carried out in three states of the five southeast states. using a multistage sampling technique, a total of 144 loan beneficiaries in the three segments of mfis, namely; formal (commercial and development banks); semi-formal...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to examine the contribution of nurses and midwives to the education of medical colleagues in the clinical context. METHODS The research design was a cross-sectional survey using an online questionnaire. A subsample of 2906 respondents, from a total of 4763 nurses and midwives participating in a web-based study, had taught doctors in the 12 months prior to t...

The advent of Web technology has enabled new ways in which groups of people may interact, leading to the development of online communities. In an academic environment these virtual communities can facilitate collaboration and provide new ways for educators to communicate and disseminate their ideas and practices. A website designed to support a community of educators interested in scholarship a...