Researching the everyday: young people’s experiences and expressions of citizenship

This paper reports on a research study which drew attention to the constitutive nature of the everyday world in young people’s subjectivities and practices of citizenship. Central to the aim of this research was a need for alignment between the focus of the research (‘everyday’ citizenship), with methods which could illuminate the day-to-day experiences of being a citizen. In this paper, I re-examine some of the ‘everyday’ data generated by two research methods which were initially discounted as rambling or divergent. This data characteristically had frequent interjections, incomplete sentences, questions and queries, or a sense of ambiguity and uncertainty. Through a re-analysis of this data, I consider the potential it offers to contribute conceptual and theoretical insights into young people’s citizenship dispositions and practices. The research revealed the diverse, complex and contested understandings of citizenship that young people were forming in the context of day-to-day social and spatial interactions.     

Information retrieval as semantic inference: a Graph Inference model applied to medical search

This paper presents a Graph Inference retrieval model that integrates structured knowledge resources, statistical information retrieval methods and inference in a unified framework. Key components of the model are a graph-based representation of the corpus and retrieval driven by an inference mechanism achieved as a traversal over the graph. The model is proposed to tackle the semantic gap problem—the mismatch between the raw data and the way a human being interprets it. We break down the semantic gap problem into five core issues, each requiring a specific type of inference in order to be overcome. Our model and evaluation is applied to the medical domain because search within this domain is particularly challenging and, as we show, often requires inference. In addition, this domain features both structured knowledge resources as well as unstructured text. Our evaluation shows that inference can be effective, retrieving many new relevant documents that are not retrieved by state-of-the-art information retrieval models. We show that many retrieved documents were not pooled by keyword-based search methods, prompting us to perform additional relevance assessment on these new documents. A third of the newly retrieved documents judged were found to be relevant. Our analysis provides a thorough understanding of when and how to apply inference for retrieval, including a categorisation of queries according to the effect of inference. The inference mechanism promoted recall by retrieving new relevant documents not found by previous keyword-based approaches. In addition, it promoted precision by an effective reranking of documents. When inference is used, performance gains can generally be expected on hard queries. However, inference should not be applied universally: for easy, unambiguous queries and queries with few relevant documents, inference did adversely affect effectiveness. These conclusions reflect the fact that for retrieval as inference to be effective, a careful balancing act is involved. Finally, although the Graph Inference model is developed and applied to medical search, it is a general retrieval model applicable to other areas such as web search, where an emerging research trend is to utilise structured knowledge resources for more effective semantic search.     

Influence of recovery time on post-activation potentiation in professional rugby players

Following a bout of heavy resistance training, the muscle is in both a fatigued and potentiated state with subsequent muscle performance depending on the balance between these two factors. To date, there is no uniform agreement about the optimal acute recovery required between the heavy resistance training and subsequent muscle performance to gain performance benefits. The aim of the present study was to determine the recovery time required to observe enhanced muscle performance following a bout of heavy resistance training. Twenty professional rugby players performed a countermovement jump at baseline and approximately 15 s, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, and 24 min after a bout of heavy resistance training (three sets of three repetitions at 87% one-repetition maximum squat). Power output, jump height, and peak rate of force development were determined for all countermovement jumps. Despite an initial decrease in countermovement jump performance after the heavy resistance training (P<0.001), participants' performance increased significantly following 8 min recovery (P<0.001) (i.e. jump height increased by 4.9%, s=3.0). The findings suggest that muscle performance during a countermovement jump can be markedly enhanced following bouts of heavy resistance training provided that adequate recovery (approximately 8 min) is allowed between the heavy resistance training and the explosive activity.     

The Discursive Production of the Male/Female Dualism in School Settings

In this paper, the discursive practices through which males and females are created as opposites and through which people become identifiably one or the other are analysed. It is shown how gender is created by individuals and within individuals as they learn the discursive practices through which to locate themselves as individuals and as members of the social world. Particular focus is given to the narratives through which children learn what it means to be male or female, and through which they become locked into (and thus limited by) masculine and feminine subject positions. The special place of the images and metaphors embedded in those narratives in constituting individual psyches, and in setting up patterns of belief and desire organised around a dualistic pattern of maleness and femaleness will be a central focus of the paper.     

Enhancing use of learning sciences research in planning for and supporting educational change: Leveraging and building social networks

This paper explores practical ways to engage two areas of educational scholarship—research on science learning and research on social networks—to inform efforts to plan and support implementation of new standards. The standards, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; NGSS Lead States in Next generation science standards: For states, by states. National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 2013), have been adopted by U.S. states serving more than one-quarter of all students, and they are grounded in decades of research on how students learn science. In this paper we discuss efforts to leverage recent research on social networks to inform standards implementation across a set of professional associations and school districts. These efforts are being undertaken by the Research + Practice Collaboratory which is testing a set of conjectures related to how the knowledge base from both research and practice can mutually inform STEM education improvement.     

Malaysian Parents' Ideal and Actual Perceptions of Pre-school Education La Perception Ideale et la Perception Reelle de l'Enseignement Prescolaire par les Parents Malaisiens Percepciones Ideales y Reales de los Padres Malasios sobre la Educacion Preescolar

This study explores and describes the perceptions of Malaysian parents concerning pre-school education. The study examines the potential influence of socio-cultural elements on the parents' perceptions and in doing so, challenges the current notion of what constitutes 'appropriateness' in early childhood education. Findings indicate that Malaysian parents hold both idealised and actualised perceptions of pre-school education. The former relate to the parents' image of childhood and the type of education they would like their child to receive in an ideal world, whilst the latter relate to the type of education parents feel their child needs in order to meet the needs of Malaysian society. The authors suggest that this model may be a useful one for exploring perceptions in future studies. Cette etude explore et decrit la perception de l'enseignement prescolaire par les parents malaisiens. Elle examine l'influence potentielle des elements socioculturels sur la perception des parents et elle souleve ainsi la question de ce qui constitue le caractere 'approprie' de 1'enseignement des tres jeunes enfants. Les resultats indiquent que les parents malaisiens ont une perception idealisee et une perception actualisee de 1'enseignement prescolaire. La premiere depend de 1'image que les parents se font de 1'enfance et du type d'education qu'ils voudraient que leur enfant recoive d'un point de vue ideal, tandis que le seconde se rattache au type d'education que les parents pensent necessaire a leur enfant pour repondre aux besoins de la societe malaisienne. Les auteurs suggerent que ce modele pourrait sent a explorer les perceptions dans de futures etudes. Este estudjo explora y describe las percepejones de los padres malasios con relacion a la educacion preescolar. El estudio examina la posible influencia de los elementos socioculturales en las percepciones de los padres y, con ello, se reta la nocion actual de lo que constituye 'lo apropiado' en la educacion de la infancia. Los descubrimientos indican que los padres malasios tienen tanto percepciones idealizadas como reales de la educacion preescolar. La primera hace relacion a la imagen que los padres tienen de la infancia y el tipo de educacion que les gustaria que sus hijos recibieran en un mundo ideal, mientras que la segunda hace relacion al tipo de educacion que los padres creen que necesitan sus hijos a fin de satisfacer las necesidades de la sociedad malasia. Los autores sugieren que este modelo podria ser util para explorar percepciones en futuros estudios.     

The experience and expression of romantic jealousy in same‐sex and opposite‐sex romantic relationships

This study examines and compares how males and females in same‐sex and opposite‐sex romantic relationships experience and express romantic jealousy. Undergraduates at a large, southern university and visitors at a metropolitan Pride Celebration (N = 149) completed measures assessing cognitive and emotional jealousy experience, jealousy expression, and demographic information. The reported usage of two of Guerrero, Andersen, Jorgensen, Spitzberg, and Eloy's (1995) communicative responses to jealousy typology significantly varied by sexual orientation and sex. Specifically, gay males were significantly more likely to use violent communication/ threats than were heterosexual males. Further, lesbians reported using manipulation attempts to a significantly lesser degree than did heterosexual participants and gay males. In contrast, levels of cognitive and emotional jealousy experience did not significantly differ by sexual orientation or sex. Implications for these findings are presented in light of the broader study of close opposite‐sex and same‐sex romantic relationships.