It has frequently been claimed that work experience can contribute to higher educational standards in schools and in higher education and contribute to the development of a exible, highly-skilled and enterprising labour force. This potential was endorsed by the Dearing Report on higher education, although there is little research evidence about the contribution of work experience to the higher education curriculum. This article reports on four empirical studies of work experience in higher education, which suggest that work experience is related to a more positive view of the learning experience and to higher employment rates. However, retrospective views of graduates tend to be more positive than those of current undergraduates and there appear to be distinct subject variations in the impact of different types of work experience. It is argued that the potential is more likely to be realised where work experience placements have six characteristics of good practice and where the higher education curriculum consistently encourages students to re ect well on their own learning.A. Blackwell et al.The National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (NCIHE) placed considerable emphasis on work experience in its nal report, concluding, amongst other things, that 'students can bene t from experience in many different settings, structured and informal, paid and unpaid. Their academic experience should help them understand how experience relates to their personal and future development' (NCIHE, 1997, para. 9.30). The Committee's Chairman, Sir Ron Dearing, knew from his earlier work on the school curriculum that work experience has frequently been advanced as a powerful way of raising standards in primary and secondary schools and that there have been repeated calls for the curriculum to be more work-related.The claims that are made for work experience, whether as a part of the school or higher education curriculum, can be summarised under the following headings:

The study of human long-term memory has for over 50 years been dominated by research on words. This is partly due to lack of suitable nonverbal materials. Experience in developing a clinical test suggested that door scenes can provide an ecologically relevant and sensitive alternative to the faces and geometrical figures traditionally used to study visual memory. In pursuing this line of research, we have accumulated over 2000 door scenes providing a database that is categorized on a range of variables including building type, colour, age, condition, glazing, and a range of other physical characteristics. We describe an illustrative study of recognition memory for 100 doors tested by yes/no, two-alternative, or four-alternative forced-choice paradigms. These stimuli, together with the full categorized database, are available through a dedicated website. We suggest that door scenes provide an ecologically relevant and participant-friendly source of material for studying the comparatively neglected field of visual long-term memory.