Incremental training intensities increases loads on the lower back of elite female rowers

Lumbar-pelvic kinematics change in response to increasing rowing stroke rates, but little is known about the effect of incremental stroke rates on changes in joint kinetics and their implications for injury. The purpose of this study was to quantify the effects of incremental rowing intensities on lower limb and lumbar-pelvic kinetics. Twelve female rowers performed an incremental test on a rowing ergometer. Kinematic data of rowers’ ankle, knee, hip and lumbar-pelvic joints, as well as external forces at the handle, seat and foot-stretchers of the rowing machine were recorded. Inter-segmental moments and forces were calculated using inverse dynamics and were compared across stroke rates using repeated measures ANOVA. Rowers exhibited increases in peak ankle and L5/S1 extensor moments, reductions in peak knee moments and no change in peak hip moments, with respect to stroke rate. Large shear and compressive forces were seen at L5/S1 and increased with stroke rate (P < 0.05). This coincided with increased levels of lumbar-pelvic flexion. High levels of lumbar-pelvic loading at higher stroke rates have implications with respect to injury and indicated that technique was declining, leading to increased lumbar-pelvic flexion. Such changes are not advantageous to performance and can potentially increase the risk of developing injuries.     

Special educational needs in mainstream secondary school physical education: learning support assistants have their say

Learning support assistants (LSAs) gained more political and academic attention in Britain after Estelle Morris announced that schools of the future would include more trained staff to support learning to higher standards. LSAs, thus, should form an integral part of the culture of all school departments in Britain, including physical education (PE). The paper uses Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony to explore the processes and practices that shape the views and experiences of LSAs and ultimately the extent to which they facilitate an inclusive culture in PE. A web survey gathered the views and experiences of LSAs vis-à-vis the inclusion of pupils with special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream secondary school PE in North-West England. A modified version of the tailored design method participant contact strategy resulted in 343 LSAs starting the web survey, with 154 (45%) following it through to completion. All quantitative data were analysed using Microsoft Excel whilst qualitative data were subjected to thematic analysis. This entailed the identification of recurring themes and patterns present in the data. The findings highlight the hegemonic status of English, maths and science when it comes to the allocation of SEN resources, which most LSAs support and often reinforce. PE is particularly disadvantaged in this hierarchy of subject priority. The majority of LSAs have not received PE-specific training, which brings into question their ability to facilitate inclusion in PE. Moreover, many schools do not appear to value the involvement of LSAs in the planning of differentiated lessons, which could have a negative impact on the PE experiences of some pupils with SEN given that LSAs are perhaps most aware of the specific learning needs of the pupils they support.     

Assessment of Teacher Reactions to a Standards-Based Teacher Evaluation System: A Pilot Study*

This article reports on teachers' reactions to a pilot implementation of a new standards-based teacher evaluation system in a medium-sized Midwestern school district. The system, based on the Framework for Teaching (Danielson, 1996), was intended to serve as the foundation for a new knowledge and skill pay plan for teachers. Teacher reactions were measured using both interview and survey methods. Teachers' overall favorableness toward the system, as measured by the survey, was correlated with acceptance of the teaching standards, perception of the evaluation process as fair and the evaluator as capable and objective, and perception that the evaluation system had a positive impact on their teaching. In interviews, teachers perceived both positive and negative aspects of the system, and for many these more or less balanced each other. While most teachers accepted the evaluation standards and the need for an evaluation system, many also perceived that the system added too much to teachers' workloads and did not provide enough feedback. Based on these results several changes were made in the evaluation system prior to full implementation. The results are discussed with reference to previous research and the Personnel Evaluation Standards.     

Behavior management in cognitive early education

Even though behavior management is a very high priority of teachers of young children, systems of behavior management receive less attention than do methods of teaching academic content. Even when there are well developed sytems of behavior management, they do not necessarily reflect the same philosophy and methods of teaching that are used to teach content. The authors report on “cognitive-mediational behavior management”, a system designed to be consistent with a cognitive early education program, the Cognitive Curriculum for Young Children. In both behavior management and all their other teaching, teachers use in this program a mediational teaching style. Teachers emphasize thinking processes rather than correct answers, take a problem-solving approach to learning, help children to acquire generalizable strategies of thinking and problem-solving rather than using trial-and-error learning, are optimistic about children’s abilities to learn, and facilitate children’s acquisition of fundamental thinking modes. This system is seen as basically incompatible with a behaviorist, contingent reinforcement system. Behavior sequences are suggested for working with unacceptable behavior so as to produce both behavior change and cognitive change.     

Choice and goal-directed behavior in preschool children

Preschool children (3–4 years old) were trained to perform two actions to gain different outcomes, in the form of video clips from different cartoons, before one of these outcomes was devalued by noncontingent exposure. The effect of outcome devaluation was subsequently assessed in an extinction test by giving children the opportunity to perform both actions in the absence of any outcomes. When the two actions were trained concurrently, performance during the test was modulated by outcome value and children showed a preference for the action trained with the currently valued outcome. By contrast, when each action was trained separately on different trials, test performance was insensitive to outcome devaluation. These effects of the training schedules are interpreted in terms of dual-process theories of action control.     

Auditorysame/different concept learning by monkeys

Two rhesus monkeys learned the auditory abstract concept ofsame/different. They were trained with 38 different environmental and natural sounds, which were arranged in different combinations as training progressed. Upon transfer to 138 different novel stimuli, they performed as well (78.8% correct) on the first exposure to the novel stimuli as they did (77.3%) with their training stimuli. The comparatively large set of training sounds, contact with the sound source, and a special fading procedure are thought to have contributed to the monkeys’ being able to learn this concept. Implications for species’ similarities/differences in cognitive processing are discussed.