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Previous research has explored the importance of effective course advising to academic success. Course advising that is student-focused and takes a “whole-of-student” approach has been found to be especially important for students that have historically been minoritised in tertiary education. This includes students who are Indigenous, first-in-family, or from low socio-economic backgrounds. However, no research, to our knowledge, has investigated how Pacific students and staff envision course advising. Given Pacific students are among the fastest growing academic cohort in New Zealand and Australia, it is important for universities to understand how to foster Pacific student success. This research involved a series of talanoa (conversations) with both Pacific students and staff to better understand the current role of course advising in student decision-making, future hopes for the development of course advising, and suggestions to improve Pacific support in course advice. Understanding the perspective of Pacific students and staff helps to highlight the current gaps in course advising systems and encourages universities to acknowledge the importance of relationship building, the development of cultural competencies, and increasing Pacific representation in the course advising process. Results support reassessing course advising systems to help improve retention rates of Pacific students. ... How Can Course Advising Better Support Pacific Student Success? by Marea S. Colombo, Ruthie E. Holmes, Cameron D. Young & Stephen Scott is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Despite considerable interest in the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) during early childhood, until recently, there has been little consideration about whether and how ToM skills continue to change into adulthood. Furthermore, the false-belief task, which is believed to capture the underlying mechanisms of ToM, is rarely used in studies of ToM with adults; those tasks that do assess false-belief understanding may be confounded by incidental task demands, such as complex narratives and excessive memory requirements, making it difficult to isolate adults’ true ToM skills, much less to compare them with the skills of children. Here, we adapted a task developed by Valle, Massaro, Castelli, and Marchetti (2015, https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.v11i1.829) to assess false-belief understanding in adults. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. In the reading condition, participants read a story about the unexpected transfer of a ball between three brothers. In the video condition, participants watched a video version of the same story. Finally, in the training condition, participants were first trained on the names of the characters, before watching the video. Although condition did not affect participants’ ability to correctly answer a standard false belief question (“Where does X think Y thinks the ball is?”), participants in the training condition used more mental state language to justify their responses (“Why does X think Y thinks the ball is here?”), and this improved performance was mediated by improved memory for the story details. We conclude that at least some “failures” of ToM use may be due to an inability to understand, recall, or communicate complex information in a ToM task, raising important questions about how best to measure ToM in adults (and children) in the future.