There's a Deathless Myth on the Close Tonight: Re-assessing Rugby's Place in the History of Sport

Rugby School has traditionally been credited with an important place in the development of modern organised games. The most famous names in this attribution have been William Webb Ellis, the pupil who ‘invented’ rugby football, and Dr. Thomas Arnold, the headmaster who gained global recognition through the publication of Tom Brown's Schooldays. Not surprisingly, academic historians have debunked the significance of both of these men, since it is demonstrable that Webb Ellis did nothing of significance and that Arnold had little interest in games. But the significance of the school in this respect is in some ways even greater in reality – though quite different – from that in the popular myths. ‘The Close’ in the mid-nineteenth century was a recreational and moral laboratory in the making of games. The boys there not only invented new rules, skills and customs but took them rapidly to other schools, universities and cities. Moreover, such Rugbeans as Richard Sykes, William Arnold, Herbert Castens and Tom Wills took the practices of the Close to five continents, instituting a global sporting revolution which would have occurred whether ‘organised games’ became an approved necessity of education or not. This account uses some important previously uncited sources, especially the various minutes and journals produced by the boys at Rugby.     

A Comprehensive Plan for Library Support of Online and Extended Education

ABSTRACT

Acknowledging Arizona State University's (ASU) long-term goal of 100,000 students in online degree programs and recognizing the 8 new 100% online undergraduate programs slated to come online in 2010, ASU Libraries is planning for the continued integration and relevance of the library to online students and programs. During the summer and fall of 2009, the ASU Libraries Task Force for Online and Extended Education met to develop the elements of a Comprehensive Plan for Library Support of Online Programs. The plan includes: (1) guiding principles for library support of online and extended education; (2) a needs assessment and environmental scan; and (3) a sustainable and scalable plan for library support of the online programs. This article discusses the process of developing the comprehensive plan.     

Assessing Deception Detection Accuracy with Dichotomous Truth–Lie Judgments and Continuous Scaling: Are People Really More Accurate When Honesty Is Scaled?

Deception detection experiments consistently find that people are only slightly better than chance at distinguishing truths from lies. Interpersonal deception theory research, however, claims that people can accurately detect deception when honesty is assessed with continuous scaling. This article reports an experiment (N = 140) directly testing if the type of measurement meaningfully impacts accuracy results and conclusions. The findings suggest that the difference is largely illusory, and that the differences that are observed are attributable to differential variances in the measures. Substantively, both methods yield similar conclusions including slightly better-than-chance accuracy, persistent truth bias, and a robust veracity effect.     

Diversity in collaborative research communities: a multicultural,multidisciplinary thesis writing group in public health

Writing groups for doctoral students are generally agreed to provide valuable learning spaces for Ph.D. candidates. Here an academic developer and the eight members of a writing group formed in a Discipline of Public Health provide an account of their experiences of collaborating in a multicultural, multidisciplinary thesis writing group. We consider the benefits of belonging to such a group for Ph.D. students who are operating in a research climate in which disciplinary boundaries are blurring and where an increasing number of doctoral projects are interdisciplinary in nature; in which both academic staff and students come from enormously diverse cultural and language backgrounds; and in which teamwork, networking and collaboration are prized but not always proactively facilitated. We argue that doctoral writing groups comprising students from diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds can be of significant value for postgraduates who wish to collaborate on their own academic development to improve their research writing and communication skills; at the same time, such collaborative work effectively builds an inclusive, dynamic research community.     

School Choice and the Politics of Parenthood: Exploring Parent Mobilization As a Catalyst for the Common Good

A substantial body of research has shown how white, middle-class parents in urban school districts use school choice as a tool to pursue educational advantages for their children. The purpose of this qualitative research was to examine the debate over neighborhood schools and school choice among a diverse group of parents in a gentrifying, yet highly diverse New York City neighborhood that I call “Prospect Point.” My central focus was studying a parent advocacy group that supports neighborhood schools. Findings show that about one third of families living in Prospect Point choose to send their children to charter or gifted and talented (G&T) schools located outside of the neighborhood. Given this outflow of parents and resources via school choice, most of the gentrifier parents in the sample who opted in to the local schools viewed their choice as a politically charged decision, and they credited the parent advocacy group as having influenced it. As a group, they rejected the consumer model of school choice, which they believed put the local schools at a disadvantage and was the norm for their racial/ethnic and socioeconomic demographic. Opt-in parents in this context recognized their privilege, and their children’s privilege, in the school-choice process and actively sought to diminish it through their choice to opt in. This research has important implications for the transformative role that parent mobilization can play in the future of diverse, high-quality public education and our democratic society.     

Exploring barriers for psychiatrists in discussing substance abuse with child and adolescent patients: a multiple goals approach

Patients suffering from psychiatric illnesses, however, are often at increased risk for substance use disorders; therefore, it is important for practitioners to have effective conversations about substance use with these patients. Child and adolescent psychiatrists (CAPs), in particular, are in a unique position to identify early substance use and affect the trajectory of adolescents who are at increased risk for substance abuse. To better understand such communication between psychiatrists and their patients, we conducted 21 in-depth interviews with CAPs to explore what barriers exist to prevent or dissuade CAPs from discussing substance abuse with their patients. We found barriers to effective communication at the micro, meso, and macro levels within the ecology of the field of psychiatry. A multiple goals perspective allowed us to determine how these barriers affect communication choices. Findings from the study highlight the significant communication challenges faced by psychiatrists in this context.     

Young children's use of video as a source of socially relevant information

Although prior research clearly shows that toddlers have difficulty learning from video, the basis for their difficulty is unknown. In the 2 current experiments, the effect of social feedback on 2-year-olds' use of information from video was assessed. Children who were told "face to face" where to find a hidden toy typically found it, but children who were given the same information by a person on video did not. Children who engaged in a 5-min contingent interaction with a person (including social cues and personal references) through closed-circuit video before the hiding task used information provided to find the toy. These findings have important implications for educational television and use of video stimuli in laboratory-based research with young children.     

The role of keypecking during filled intervals on the judgment of time for empty and filled intervals by pigeons

Pigeons were trained in a within-subjects design to discriminate empty intervals (bound by two 1-sec visual markers) and filled intervals (a continuous visual signal). The intervals were signaled by different visual stimuli and they required responses to different sets of comparison stimuli. In Experiment 1, empty intervals were judged longer than filled intervals. The difference between the point of subjective equality (PSE) for the empty intervals and the PSE for filled intervals increased as the magnitude of the anchor-duration pairs increased. Although there was more pecking during filled intervals than during empty intervals, there was no significant correlation between pecking during filled intervals and the value of the PSE. In Experiment 2, empty intervals continued to be judged longer than filled intervals, even when pigeons were required to refrain from pecking during filled intervals. Keypecking per se does not appear to play an important role in the empty-filled timing difference.     

Impact of the word “bully” on the reported rate of bullying behavior

This study examined whether the definition and use of the word “bully” would result in lower self‐reports of bullying behavior by providing students with one of three versions of a self‐report measure with: (a) no reference to the word bully or its definition, (b) the definition of the word bully followed by use of the word in each item, or (c) the definition of the word bully and no further mention of the word bully in the item stems. Participants (N = 114) completed surveys, and statistical comparisons examined the impact of the word bully on reports of bullying behavior. Analyses indicated that respondents provided with a definition of and repeated exposure to the word bully reported significantly less bullying behavior than those who were not exposed to the word or its definition. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Explaining Variability in Response Style Traits: A Covariate-Adjusted IRTree

Contamination of responses due to extreme and midpoint response style can confound the interpretation of scores, threatening the validity of inferences made from survey responses. This study incorporated person-level covariates in the multidimensional item response tree model to explain heterogeneity in response style. We include an empirical example and two simulation studies to support the use and interpretation of the model: parameter recovery using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimation and performance of the model under conditions with and without response styles present. Item intercepts mean bias and root mean square error were small at all sample sizes. Item discrimination mean bias and root mean square error were also small but tended to be smaller when covariates were unrelated to, or had a weak relationship with, the latent traits. Item and regression parameters are estimated with sufficient accuracy when sample sizes are greater than approximately 1,000 and MCMC estimation with the Gibbs sampler is used. The empirical example uses the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health’s sexual knowledge scale. Meaningful predictors associated with high levels of extreme response latent trait included being non-White, being male, and having high levels of parental support and relationships. Meaningful predictors associated with high levels of the midpoint response latent trait included having low levels of parental support and relationships. Item-level covariates indicate the response style pseudo-items were less easy to endorse for self-oriented items, whereas the trait of interest pseudo-items were easier to endorse for self-oriented items.