The HPT Model Applied to a Boutique‐Style Online Retail Store

Suzy Q's is a retail business located in the southeastern United States. It offers hand‐knitted scarves; handmade hair accessories; handcrafted beaded jewelry such as necklaces, bracelets, and earrings; small handmade children's toys; and stock and custom‐printed T‐shirts. It began operations in early 2014. The owners established an online store and developed plans to sell items at local craft fairs and farmers’ markets in the southeastern United States. During its initial launch, the business generated limited orders for its products. In the beginning there was a limited amount of advertising using social media, which consisted of establishing a Facebook page, posting notifications on the business's Facebook page, and posting notifications about the business to the owners’ personal contacts on Facebook. Despite establishing a web presence and utilizing social media in its first year of operations, Suzy Q's did not generate a significant number of orders and received very little revenue. The owners of Suzy Q's, our client, established a goal to generate at least $700 per month in revenue for the calendar year 2015. Our analysis of the business revealed that the managers and employees had the skills needed to perform the work, but the lack of orders presented an obstacle to achieving their business goals. After completing a performance analysis, we recommended that Suzy Q's establish a single online presence, implement a marketing effort, establish a local presence, create a dedicated studio space, and create a formal business plan. It was our belief that Suzy Q's had the potential to reach its goals set for 2015 and beyond if these solutions were implemented.     

Individual Differences in Childhood Behavior Disorders Associated With Epigenetic Modulation of the Cortisol Receptor Gene

Behavioral/emotional difficulties in children are the first sign of mental health problems. These problems are however, heterogeneous. A domain that may identify homogenous subgroups is hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal function. This study tested whether epigenetic regulation of glucocorticoid receptor gene could explain the co‐occurrence of anxiety problems in children with behavior problems. Four‐ to 16‐year‐old clinically referred children (N = 241) were measured for psychiatric symptoms, methylation of target CpG sites in blood or saliva, and morning cortisol levels in those who gave blood. Increased methylation of promoter 1F CpG sites was associated with higher vulnerability to co‐occurring internalizing symptoms and morning cortisol. The results support increasing optimism that epigenetic regulation of key neuroendocrine systems might help explain hitherto unfathomable individual differences in susceptibility to psychiatric symptom profiles.     

Book Reviews

Ted Goodhew, T.R.I.S.T. Advisory Teacher, Berkshire County Council, ‘New Directions in Pastoral Care’, Edited by Peter Lang & Michael Marland, 1985 Blackwell —

Professor R. F. Dearden, University of Birmingham, Profiles and Records of Achievement, Patricia Broadfoot (ed) 1986 Holt, Rinehart and Winston £6.50 paperback

Pat Salder, Education for Capability, Ed Tyrrell Burgess N. F. E. K./Nelson 1986 £10.95

John Alcock, University of Warwick, Solo Monologues for Drama,John Goodwin and Bill Taylor 1985 Edward Arnold Ltd £2.15

Caroline Lodge, White Hart Lane School, London, Sharing,Beryl Heather FPA Education Unit 1984 52pp £3.50     

“Forget birth pains,we haven't got past the conception stage yet”. A reply to Frank Coffield's ‘Britain's continuing failure to train: the birth pangs of a new policy’

This article is a response to Frank Coffield's recent reflections in this journal on the Performance and Innovation Unit's project on workforce development in Britain. It questions the extent to which the PIU's findings represent a ‘new understanding’ of the UK's skills problem and asks why academics have been so reluctant to spell out what a demand‐side strategy for tackling the problem would involve.     

Acting up or acting out? Unlocking children's talk in literature circles

It is generally accepted that talk enriches children's interpretations of texts in literature circle discussions. However, the nature of that talk and exactly how it facilitates interpretation of texts has not been much analysed. This article describes some work undertaken with a class of Scottish children, aged 9–10, to introduce them to the idea of literature circles. The literature circle discussions were then recorded and analysed. The purpose of the project was to record the kinds of exchanges, chains of comment and range of discourses and voices that children used when talking among themselves, and to reflect on their function and value. It was found that a lot of the talk was exploratory though not always in the sense proposed by Mercer. In his terms much was ‘cumulative’. Some talk veered towards anecdotal chat. The children also frequently put on voices not their own, mimicking characters in the story they were reading, and other people they knew. These forms of talk are not always encouraged in the classroom, their effectiveness for learning being in doubt. This article argues that cumulative talk, the telling of anecdotes and the performing of different characters' voices all have a useful function in discussions of books: they can encourage engagement, be helpful in bringing texts to life and advance children's thinking about literature.     

Restructuring teachers’ work‐lives and knowledge in England and Spain

This article explores the restructuring of education in England and Spain. Against a presumably homogeneous global streamlining of educational systems according to competition‐driven goals, the comparison of teachers’ work‐lives and professional knowledge evidences a variety of experiences under‐represented in discourses on global restructuring. Our argument highlights how in England political reforms have worked their way deep into the working lives of professionals, giving rise to a ‘managerial’ model of professionalism, whereas in Spain reforms are more loosely coupled with teachers’ work, favoring a ‘social service’‐oriented model. However, despite the different professional ideals, teachers uniformly stressed the challenges they face were predominantly due to broader social transformations for which policy reforms provided few if any remedies. Our study emphasizes the variety of educational reforms and teachers’ experiences in the European context and argues further educational change should be bound to the historical trajectory and the concrete needs of the professionals in question.     

Stereotype threat among students with disabilities: the importance of the evaluative context on their cognitive performance

European Journal of Psychology of Education - This study investigated the hypothesis that cognitive performance of students with physical disabilities may be influenced by the evaluators’...     

Effect of surrogate design on the measured stiffness of snowboarding wrist protectors

In snowboarding, the wrist is the most common injury site, as snowboarders often put their arms out to cushion a fall. This can result in a compressive load through the carpals coupled with wrist hyperextension, leading to ligament sprains or carpal and forearm bone fractures. Wrist protectors are worn by snowboarders in an effort to reduce injury risk, by decreasing peak impact forces and limiting wrist extension to prevent hyperextension during falls. There is no international standard or universally accepted performance specification that snowboarding wrist protectors should conform to, resulting in an inability to judge which designs offer the best protection. This study investigated how surrogate arm design affected the stiffness of wrist protectors during quasi-static mechanical testing. Three surrogate arms with increasing design complexity were used to test three wrist protectors. The results show that surrogate design does influence the stiffness of snowboarding wrist protectors. Given that the surrogate does influence protector performance, it is recommended that a standard surrogate design is established for research and product testing.     

The role of the referee in physical education lessons: student experience and motivation

Introduction: Social roles in physical education (PE) classes have been much studied, especially mentoring and coaching roles. The studies have shown that mentoring and coaching are beneficial not only for motor learning, but also for methodological and social learning. To our knowledge, the role of the student referee in PE lessons has never been specifically studied. Yet refereeing is essential in many sports, including team sports, and provides an experience of responsibility that many teachers want to offer their students. Encouraging students to take on this role can nevertheless be difficult.

Objective: The objective of the present study was to gain access to students’ lived experiences as referees in order to determine their strategies for being effective. We particularly wanted to determine which concerns organized their activity so that we could identify a refereeing typology that would be useful for PE teaching. Our study is original in that we did not rely exclusively on experiential data to understand student refereeing activity. We also collected data on the students’ motivation in order to better understand their experiences. For this purpose, the study was conducted within the methodological framework of course-of-action theory and self-determination theory.

Method: Seventy-four students from three classes in the third year of middle school (about 13 years old) participated in the study. Among them, four (two girls and two boys and not experts in the sports in which they were going to referee) had volunteered to be filmed and to participate in self-confrontation interviews. The other students completed two questionnaires to provide information on their motivation for refereeing. The situations studied were basketball and handball matches held at the end of the lessons.

Two categories of data were collected: qualitative and quantitative. The qualitative data were based on audiovisual recordings of the students as they refereed matches and verbalization data from self-confrontation interviews; these data were used to document the students’ courses of experience during the activity period under study. The quantitative data were collected using two questionnaires, one to assess the determinants of motivation and the other to assess self-determined motivation.

Results and discussion: The qualitative analysis highlighted three typical student involvements: fulfilling the role of referee, getting help, and occasionally dropping out of the role. The quantitative analysis revealed that the students in the social role of referee mainly expressed amotivation, external regulation, and intrinsic motivation toward knowledge and accomplishment.

The results are discussed around two major points: (1) the students’ strategies of alternation from which their refereeing activity emerged and (2) proposals for PE teacher interventions.