The Ultimate Beneficiaries of Continuing Professional Development Programs: Middle School Students’ Nature of Science Views

The effective continuing professional development (CPD) programs primarily aim to have an impact on teachers’ knowledge bases, beliefs, and views and their classroom practices, which rationally lead most of the researchers to investigate those changes on teachers primarily. Although neglected, the interrelationship between CPD programs and students is considered complex, and CPDs ultimately aim to have an impact on students’ views, too. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to survey the changes of middle school students’ views of the nature of science (NOS) by providing a large-scale CPD to their teachers and, in other words, identify the impact of CPD on ultimate beneficiaries, namely students. In this study, 10 science teachers’ data and, in the first phase, 481 and, in the second phase, 422 students’ data and the changes in their NOS views were analyzed. Results showed that the students’ and teachers’ NOS views changed positively. For the impact of teachers on the students’ views, the teachers’ prior NOS knowledge, years of experience, and the number of implemented activities were found to be the influential factors for the transmission of NOS views.

     

Profile and Motivations of Registered Whole-Body Donors in Turkey: Istanbul University Experience

Little is known regarding the profiles of whole body donors in Muslim majority countries where donation is scarce. Therefore, this study aims to profile registered donors in Turkey by means of a survey. The explored data could be used to improve ongoing campaign efforts and ethical practices such as commemoration services. Registered donors of the donation programs at the two faculties of medicine of Istanbul University were compared with the national population and a cluster analysis was performed to reveal any concealed sub-groups. Data from 188 respondents were analyzed. The majority of registered donors were married (42%), male (65.4%), aged over 50 years (76%), held a tertiary education degree (49.7%), and were irreligious (58.5%). Cluster analysis revealed two groups with significantly different educational levels, marital statuses, and religious choices. Regarding whether their bodies could be used for education or research, the majority (64.5%) of the respondents left the decision to the anatomy department. Similarly, 73.8% approved indefinite use of their organs, body parts and/or skeletons. The respondents were also willing to share their medical history (94.2%) and personal information (81.6%) if needed. Motivational themes for body donation including usefulness, impermanence, religion, awareness, and kinship were devised after a thematic analysis. Among the respondents, 56.5% were registered organ donors and 63.3% were frequent blood donors. The results of this study provide data that may help revising informed consent forms, developing and implementing thanksgiving ceremonies, and selecting additional targets for supporting body donation campaign activities such as organ and blood donation units.     

The evidence for the impact of policy on physical activity outcomes within the school setting: A systematic review

BackgroundDespite the well-established health benefits of physical activity (PA) for young people (aged 4–19 years), most do not meet PA guidelines. Policies that support PA in schools may be promising, but their impact on PA behavior is poorly understood. The aim of this systematic review was to ascertain the level and type of evidence reported in the international scientific literature for policies within the school setting that contribute directly or indirectly to increasing PA.MethodsThis systematic review is compliant with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis guidelines. Six databases were searched using key concepts of policy, school, evaluation, and PA. Following title and abstract screening of 2323 studies, 25 progressed to data synthesis. Methodological quality was assessed using standardized tools, and the strength of the evidence of policy impact was described based on pre-determined codes: positive, negative, inconclusive, or untested statistically.ResultsEvidence emerged for 9 policy areas that had a direct or indirect effect on PA within the school setting. These were whole school PA policy, physical education, sport/extracurricular PA, classroom-based PA, active breaks/recess, physical environment, shared use agreements, active school transport, and surveillance. The bulk of the evidence was significantly positive (54%), 27% was inconclusive, 9% was significantly negative, and 11% was untested (due to rounding, some numbers add to 99% or 101%). Frequency of evidence was highest in the primary setting (41%), 34% in the secondary setting, and 24% in primary/secondary combined school settings. By policy area, frequency of evidence was highest for sport/extracurricular PA (35%), 17% for physical education, and 12% for whole school PA policy, with evidence for shared use agreements between schools and local communities rarely reported (2%). Comparing relative strength of evidence, the evidence for shared use agreements, though sparse, was 100% positive, while 60% of the evidence for whole school PA policy, 59% of the evidence for sport/extracurricular PA, 57% of the evidence for physical education, 50% of the evidence for PA in classroom, and 50% of the evidence for active breaks/recess were positive.ConclusionThe current evidence base supports the effectiveness of PA policy actions within the school setting but cautions against a “one-size-fits-all” approach and emphasizes the need to examine policy implementation to maximize translation into practice. Greater clarity regarding terminology, measurement, and methods for evaluation of policy interventions is needed.     

Exploring the relationship between hope and burnout in competitive sport

Abstract

Researchers have postulated that hope may be an important factor associated with burnout. Consistent with hope theory contentions, low-hope individuals may be susceptible to burnout because they are prone to experience goal blockage, frustration, and negative affect, all of which likely increase the risk of burnout. We examined the relationship between hope and athlete burnout among 178 competitive athletes (63 females and 115 males) aged 15–20 years. Hope was significantly and negatively correlated with all three burnout subscales: emotional/physical exhaustion, a reduced sense of accomplishment, and sport devaluation. Moreover, results of a multivariate analysis of variance showed that low-hope athletes scored significantly higher than medium- and high-hope athletes on all three burnout dimensions. Finally, results revealed that agency thinking was a significant predictor of all burnout dimensions. Frustration over unmet goals and a perceived lack of agency, a characteristic of low-hope athletes, might pose a risk factor in athlete burnout, whereas being able to maintain hope appears to be associated with health and well-being.     

Variable training: effects on velocity and accuracy in the tennis serve

Abstract

Variable practice has been shown to be an effective strategy to improve open motor skills. However, the usefulness of this procedure in closed motor skills remains controversial. The following study has the objective of analysing the effects of variability practice in the improvement of a closed skill. The skill studied has been the tennis serve. Thirty young tennis players (13 ± 1.52 years), divided in two groups, took part in this study. One group practiced in variable conditions and the other group in consistency conditions. Both groups performed 12 training sessions (60 serves/session). The variable practice group improved their accuracy significantly compared with the consistency group (F_3.25 = 3.078; P = 0.035). The velocity of serve increased after training in both groups (F_3.25 = 15.890; P = 0.001). The practice in variable conditions seems to be effective in improving the performance of the tennis serve.     

Reformation of VET and demands on teachers’ subject knowledge – Swedish vocational teachers’ recurrent participation in a national CPD initiative

This study investigates continuing professional development (CPD) of vocational teachers, with a focus on recurrent participation. Vocational teachers need to be competent as teachers and in relation to their vocational teaching subject. Reformation of Swedish vocational education in order to strengthen the working-life connection imposes demands on teachers to have up-to-date knowledge about the vocations related to their vocational subjects. To support the reform, vocational teachers have been offered to participate in a new national CPD initiative targeting their vocational competence. The study concerns participation in this initiative. Drawing on a socio-cultural perspective, vocational teachers’ CPD implies boundary-crossing between school and working-life. Theory concerning adults’ participation in education is considered relevant to understand conditions for such boundary-crossing, and learning, among vocational teachers. The article specifically investigates patterns in vocational teachers’ recurrent participation, which is expected to clarify the factors influencing further participation in professional development. The strongest predictor of recurrent participation, when adjusting for the influence of other factors, is the type of municipality that the teacher comes from, with low populated municipalities having the lowest likelihood of participation. Furthermore, recurrent participation is more likely by participating teachers from adult education or from privately owned schools, and by male teachers.     

陆地卫星MSS影象目视解译在土地资源调查中局限性的讨论

简述陆地卫星多光谱扫描(MSS)影象的特点,着重介绍陆地卫星多光谱扫描影象适用于中、小比例尺的土地资源凋查     

Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 (CSAI-2): evaluating the Swedish version by confirmatory factor analyses

The Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 (CSAI-2) is one of the most frequently used instruments when assessing competitive state anxiety in sport psychology research. However, doubts have been expressed about the factorial validity of both the English and the Greek versions of the scale. Hence, a revised version of the inventory (CSAI-2R) has recently been suggested to be more psychometrically sound (Cox et al., 2003). In the present study, the aim was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Swedish version of the CSAI-2 using confirmatory factor analyses. A total of 969 athletes (571 men and 398 women) competing in 26 different sports completed the Swedish version of the CSAI-2. Three different factor structures were evaluated: the original three-factor model (with cognitive anxiety, somatic anxiety and self-confidence), a two-factor model in which self-confidence was excluded, and a three-factor model containing 17 items (CSAI-2R). The results revealed that only the 17-item model displayed an acceptable fit to the data. Although some doubts remain about the amount of variance that can be attributed to error variance in the subscales, the results suggest that it is better to use the CSAI-2R rather than the original CSAI-2.     

Retrieving and classifying instances of source code plagiarism

Automatic detection of source code plagiarism is an important research field for both the commercial software industry and within the research community. Existing methods of plagiarism detection primarily involve exhaustive pairwise document comparison, which does not scale well for large software collections. To achieve scalability, we approach the problem from an information retrieval (IR) perspective. We retrieve a ranked list of candidate documents in response to a pseudo-query representation constructed from each source code document in the collection. The challenge in source code document retrieval is that the standard bag-of-words (BoW) representation model for such documents is likely to result in many false positives being retrieved, because of the use of identical programming language specific constructs and keywords. To address this problem, we make use of an abstract syntax tree (AST) representation of the source code documents. While the IR approach is efficient, it is essentially unsupervised in nature. To further improve its effectiveness, we apply a supervised classifier (pre-trained with features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs) on the top ranked retrieved documents. We report experiments on the SOCO-2014 dataset comprising 12K Java source files with almost 1M lines of code. Our experiments confirm that the AST based approach produces significantly better retrieval effectiveness than a standard BoW representation, i.e., the AST based approach is able to identify a higher number of plagiarized source code documents at top ranks in response to a query source code document. The supervised classifier, trained on features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs, is shown to effectively filter and thus further improve the ranked list of retrieved candidate plagiarized documents.