Interdisciplinarity in Adapted Physical Activity

ABSTRACT

It is commonly accepted that inquiry in adapted physical activity involves the use of different disciplines to address questions. It is often advanced today that complex problems of the kind frequently encountered in adapted physical activity require a combination of disciplines for their solution. At the present time, individual research questions in adapted physical activity are most often developed and pursued by researchers from a single discipline despite incentives to the contrary. However, the inclusion of multiple disciplines to address research questions raises a number of challenges. A major one is effective communication. The language related to the use of multiple disciplines is often used loosely. Key terms, such as multi-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary, are often used interchangeably. We introduce the technical meaning of these terms and outline some key epistemic challenges to communication across disciplines and highlight the importance of willingness, on the part of researchers, to carefully listen to each other.     

An Investigation of the Joint Influence of Faculty Control and Student Locus of Reinforcement on Instructional Evaluation

Abstract

This research was based on the theoretical belief that student evaluations of faculty teaching are related to the person-environment congruence between students’ locus of reinforcement and the degree of control exercised by faculty instructional styles. Fifty-seven college students were classified as internally or externally reinforced based on Rotter’s locus of reinforcement theory. Students evaluated high and low faculty control instructional styles by rating daily seven classroom evaluative questions on a five-point differential scale. It was hypothesized that the evaluation of instruction by students experiencing congruent control styles (internal students/low control and external students/high control) would be more positive than incongruent combinations (external students low control and internal students/high control). ANOVA results yielded a significant 937’value p <.01) for interaction effects which supported the research hypothesis. Implications for student evaluation of faculty teaching are discussed.     

A Short Test of Personality: The S-ident Form

Abstract

On the premise that affective measure" are needed by those who would accurately predict the classroom behavior of teachers, an Inventory was developed to assess a teacher's attitude toward one aspect of the teaching process, namely. Instructional objectives stated In terms of student behavior. The inventory consisted of 20 instructional objectives, some behavioral and some nonbehavioral, to be rated according to a five-point scheme. A modest but significant correlation of .25 was obtained between 50 subjects' scores on the inventory and their observed classroom use of behavioral objectives. A construct validity study involving an examination of the pre-and post-instructor factor structure on Inventory scores of 100 prospective teachers also suggested that the instrument possesses a degree of validity.     

Science masterclasses for able children in year 2

A series of science Masterclasses for six year old able children was used as the basis of this small scale research project. Strategies for challenging this group of children were developed and analysed in terms of their use of higher order thinking. The identification of able scientists at such a young age was also considered. It was found that problem solving in science and Sc 1, Scientific Enquiry, are particularly suited to provide challenge for scientifically able children.     

The meaning of response categories: How often is “occasionally,” “often,” and “very often”?

Samples of undergraduates from 30 colleges and universities responded in two ways to statements about how often they had engaged in various activities: first by indicating never, occasionally, often, or very often, and second by indicating the number of times they had engaged in the activity. Comparisons of the two sets of responses indicates that: (1) there are wide individual differences in the meaning attributed to each response category; (2) despite individual differences, the group data show clear modal differences between occasionally and often and between often and very often; (3) the median difference in the meaning of each of the response categories is very small between one institution and the next and between types of institutions; and (4) based on the present data, there is no compelling need to develop separate norms for different types of institutions.Presented at the 1981 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April 13–17, Los Angeles.     

The Reading Lab: ‘failure’, dynamic teaching and reflective practice in growing the skill of reading

ABSTRACT

University educators have observed the concurrent problems of student attrition, higher than normal or desired failure rates and students struggling to complete assessable and non-assessable work, for instance, set readings. Recent public commentary has pointed to the widening participation agenda with its lowering of university entrance scores and consequent increase in university places as factors contributing to the problem: many students are entering university without the preparation or dispositions that helped their predecessors succeed. University teachers are at the coalface of this problem. These teachers do not set entrance scores or course caps but are tasked with supporting an increasingly diverse student population.

This article offers a case study: a university teacher’s encounter with a university’s Key Accountability Measures around failure and attrition, and offers a teaching response to this policy. In response to these changing conditions, The Reading Lab was designed as a large-group learning and teaching activity in the form of a series of interactive lectures devoted to the practices of reading. The Lab sessions sought to address a problem that many scholarship-of-reading researchers have communicated: our university students are often not resilient readers and as a result often do not complete set readings. This article evaluates what the Reading Lab achieved (and failed to achieve). For instance, if it is possible (in the current climate) that the failure and attrition rates might never radically improve, how can teaching and learning activities be more positively directed towards the student experience, for even minor gains in the inclusion and the retention of students?     

Speech Content of Selected Groups of Orphanage and Non-Orphanage Preschool Children

A common item format frequently encountered on survey questionnaires is the one which asks respondents to check all those categories which are personally applicable. Thus, if there are r categories a subject is free to check none, one, or up to r categories. If the researcher wants to compare c independent groups on their responses to such an item, the usual chi-square test of homogeneity of distributions is inappropriate since subjects can appear in more than one category of the out-come measure. This paper develops and illustrates a new statistic which can compare the response patterns to the item across groups. Post hoc procedures to be used in conjunction with the statistical test are also developed.     

Women and gender studies and multicultural education: Building the agenda for 2000 and beyond

Abstract

Multicultural education has always been contested terrain, yet within the last five years a significant consensus about its scope and function has evolved. The discourse about multicultural education has not adequately attended to the debates surrounding the terms “gender” and “sex” or the multiple feminist theories that focus on the more critical aspects of a social change agenda. This article focuses on some of the tensions between women and gender studies and multicultural education such as: understanding gender as a category of analysis, theoretical constructions of feminism, and building an educational agenda for social justice in an effort to further the agenda for 2000 and beyond.     

Using Fixed Thresholds with Grouped Data in Structural Equation Modeling

Valuable methods have been developed for incorporating ordinal variables into structural equation models using a latent response variable formulation. However, some model parameters, such as the means and variances of latent factors, can be quite difficult to interpret because the latent response variables have an arbitrary metric. This limitation can be particularly problematic in growth models, where the means and variances of the latent growth parameters typically have important substantive meaning when continuous measures are used. However, these methods are often applied to grouped data, where the ordered categories actually represent an interval-level variable that has been measured on an ordinal scale for convenience. The method illustrated in this article shows how category threshold values can be incorporated into the model so that interpretation is more meaningful, with particular emphasis given to the application of this technique with latent growth models.     

A Framework for College Counseling Responses to Large Scale Traumatic Incidents

Abstract

Although most psychotherapists have limited experience dealing with large scale catastrophic incidents, college and university counseling centers today need to be prepared for crisis events such as terrorist attacks, war, and local catastrophes. This article presents a conceptual model for designing counseling center responses to large scale traumatic incidents. Familiar college mental health constructs are applied to the relatively unfamiliar territory of responding to traumatic incidents. First, DSM-IV-TR diagnostic criteria are used to define three levels of student need based on different types of stressful or traumatic events and expected reactions. Next, a corresponding three-part response plan is discussed, including preventive, intermediate, and advanced counseling and psychotherapy interventions. Finally, the college counseling roles of crisis intervention and student development consultation are discussed in relation to the aftermath of large scale traumas. The influence of staff attitudes and values, and other limitations of the model, also are described.     

Issues in Special Education Research Within International Perspectives

ABSTRACT

A comprehensive search of the Westlaw case database for the period January 1, 2008 to August 31, 2018 identified 22 court decisions that contained federal civil rights claim rulings specific to the actions of school resource officers in response to the conduct of students with disabilities. Both the quantitative and qualitative results revealed (a) a disproportionately high incidence of such court decisions among a larger sampling of 79 court decisions with such civil rights claims for public school students in general; (b) a wide variety of predominantly behavior-related disabilities, such as autism and emotional disturbance; (c) a notable number of cases in which the school resource officer’s actions were questionable in terms of disproportionately excessive force in relation to conduct that was often disability-connected and not substantially dangerous to self or others; and (d) rather gross and defendant-skewed judicial rulings. The recommendations were primarily for professional proactivity that includes but extends beyond reform of legal requirements.     

Metaphors and the psychometric paradigm

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the psychometric paradigm for understanding educational measurement and standard setting by considering the extent to which that understanding is based on metaphors. I argue that through the metaphors ‘more is up’ and ‘good is up’ we spatialise concepts that are not intrinsically spatial. Human abilities form a distinct conceptual category, with complex and varying rules for the correct usage of different ability terms. The fact that most abilities can be discussed in terms of both ‘possession’ and of ‘more or less’ invites reification, spatialisation, and hence the application of measurement metaphors. Insights into the measurement of abilities can be gained by careful consideration of how ability terms are used in normal discourse, especially of athletic abilities which are partly quantified in terms of attributes that are physically measureable. The fuzziness of natural language creates some of the problems in understanding standards in both psychometrics and physical measurement.     

Rasch analysis for psychometric improvement of science attitude rating scales

ABSTRACT

Students’ attitude towards science (SAS) is often a subject of investigation in science education research. Survey of rating scale is commonly used in the study of SAS. The present study illustrates how Rasch analysis can be used to provide psychometric information of SAS rating scales. The analyses were conducted on a 20-item SAS scale used in an existing dataset of The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) (2011). Data of all the eight-grade participants from Hong Kong and Singapore (N?=?9942) were retrieved for analyses. Additional insights from Rasch analysis that are not commonly available from conventional test and item analyses were discussed, such as invariance measurement of SAS, unidimensionality of SAS construct, optimum utilization of SAS rating categories, and item difficulty hierarchy in the SAS scale. Recommendations on how TIMSS items on the measurement of SAS can be better designed were discussed. The study also highlights the importance of using Rasch estimates for statistical parametric tests (e.g. ANOVA, t-test) that are common in science education research for group comparisons.     

Measuring Attitudinal Outcomes of Child Psychology with The Parental Attitude Research Instrument

Abstract

The assumption that laboratory training in specific teaching skills is directly related to classroom performance was tested for a sample of 32 elementary student teachers. Eight to 20 weeks after laboratory training of experimental groups and testing to verify initial training effect" samples of teaching performance of all Ss were recorded in the student teaching classrooms. These recordings were coded for exhibition of target skills by application of a low-inference category instrument which yielded scores representing rates of occurrence of the target skills per minute of teacher talk. Using a two-way analysis of variance, a statistical comparison of the rates of exhibition of the target skills by the experimental and control groups revealed no significant differences. These results are discussed in terms of the possible causes of such a lack of significant relationships between groups.     

Approaches for Effective Vocationalisation of Secondary School Agriculture in Nigeria: The Views of Agricultural Science Teachers in Delta State,Nigeria

Abstract

This paper describes a random sample of serving agricultural science teachers in Delta State, Nigeria, as a background to understanding their views on four selected approaches for effective vocationalisation of secondary school agriculture. These approaches were used to develop a 23-item questionnaire based on current literature. A five-point Likert-type scale was used to determine how well the views of the respondents corresponded with the items in the questionnaire. Results showed, among others, that the average teaching experience of the 322 sampled teachers was 12.9 years; 50.6 % of the respondents were BSc(Ed) degree holders; 38.8% had Nigerian Certificate in Education (NCE), while 10.6% were Higher National Diploma (HND) holders. The respondents agreed that the identified approaches were necessary for effective vocationalisation of secondary school agriculture. The paper therefore recommends that the identified approaches should be pursued by the Nigerian government to ensure that vocational agriculture in secondary schools achieves the goals of the National Policy on Education.     

Experienced teachers' knowledge of teaching and learning of models and modelling in science education

This article reports a study of the knowledge of experienced science teachers in the context of a reform in science education in The Netherlands. The study focused on a major goal of the reform, that is, improving students' knowledge and abilities in the field of models and modelling in science. First, seven teachers of biology and chemistry were interviewed about the teaching and learning of models and modelling in science. Next, a questionnaire was designed consisting of 30 items on a Likert-type scale. This questionnaire was completed by a group ( n = 74) of teachers of biology, chemistry and physics. Results indicated that the teachers could be grouped in two subgroups, who differed in terms of their self-reported use of teaching activities focusing on models: one sub-group applied such activities substantially more often than the other sub-group. This distinction appeared not to be related to the teachers' subject, or teaching experience. Moreover, the use of teaching activities seemed only loosely related to the teachers' knowledge of their students, particularly, students' views of models and modelling abilities. Implications for the design of teacher education are discussed.     

Curriculum and pedagogy in Key Stage 2: a survey of policy and practice in small rural primary schools

ABSTRACT

Small primary schools have often been criticized for their staff's inevitably limited cur‐ ricular expertise and consequent difficulty in providing a full National Curriculum for their pupils. Yet in terms of standards of attainment and quality of teaching such schools are rated rather more favourably than larger ones in OFSTED inspections. Based on an investigation of policy and practice in thirteen small primary schools this article attempts to examine the reality of small schools’ planning and implementation of National Curriculum requirements at Key Stage 2 and suggests possible reasons for their ‘better’ performance, at least as judged by OFSTED inspectors.     

新中国中学生成绩评定方法的实验——以五级分制记分法为个案的研究

五级分制记分法是建国初期学习苏联教育经验的过程中,在我国中学学校教育生活领域被广泛运用的一种学生学业和品行成绩评定方法。旅顺中学是我国最早实施五级分制记分法的中学,在对学生学业和品行评定的实践操作方面进行了积极的尝试,并总结了运用五级分制记分法的实践经验。科学的精神和实验的态度,是新方法实验必须遵循的基本原则。     

Understanding Category Members as "the Same Sort of Thing": Explicit Categorization in Ten-Month Infants

Although it is often acknowledged that classification exists in the first year of life, it has been suggested that infants are capable only of implicit categorization, recognizing that something is or is not familiar. In contrast, older children are thought to compare the stimuli or objects they categorize and to explicitly equate different category members. 2 habituation experiments were conducted in an attempt to determine whether 10-month-old infants are capable of explicit categorization. The approach taken was to insert nonmembers into the familiarization sequence in a categorization task. The nonmembers were designed so as to have a predictable effect on infants' performance whether or not these stimuli were included as infants processed the categorical information. The results suggest that infants do explicitly equate category members. Infants appeared to disregard the nonmembers in the familiarization sequence, basing their categorization response instead on the set of instances that were "the same sort of thing."