Influence of personal and lesson factors on caloric expenditure in physical education

BackgroundIncreasing caloric expenditure in physical education is considered an effective school-based approach to addressing the child obesity epidemic. This study was designed to determine synergistic influences of student characteristics and lesson factors on caloric expenditure in elementary and middle school physical education.MethodsThe study used a multi-level design. Level-1 factors included personal characteristics: age, gender, and body mass index. Level-2 factors included lesson length, content, and school level. Based on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention age–gender adjusted growth chart, students in 87 classes from 14 elementary and 15 middle schools were pre-screened into “Overweight”, “Healthy weight”, or “Thin” groups. One boy and one girl were randomly selected from each group in each class as data providers (264 elementary and 294 middle school students). Caloric expenditure was measured in 243 physical education lessons using accelerometers.ResultsAnalysis of variance revealed and hierarchical linear modeling confirmed separate age by body mass index, age by gender, and content by lesson–length interaction effects, suggesting that the personal and lesson factors influenced caloric expenditure independently. Older male and heavier students burned more calories in all lessons. Students burned more calories in 45–60 min sport skill or fitness lessons than in shorter (30 min) or longer (75–90 min) game or multi-activity lessons.ConclusionsThe hypothesized cross-level interaction was not observed in the data. Caloric expenditure can be optimized in 45–60 min sport skill or fitness development lessons. It can be recommended that schools adopt 45–60 min lesson length and provide skill and fitness development tasks in physical education to maximize caloric expenditure.     

Gender differences in research areas,methods and topics: Can people and thing orientations explain the results?

Although the gender gap in academia has narrowed, females are underrepresented within some fields in the USA. Prior research suggests that the imbalances between science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields may be partly due to greater male interest in things and greater female interest in people, or to off-putting masculine cultures in some disciplines. To seek more detailed insights across all subjects, this article compares practising US male and female researchers between and within 285 narrow Scopus fields inside 26 broad fields from their first-authored articles published in 2017. The comparison is based on publishing fields and the words used in article titles, abstracts, and keywords. The results cannot be fully explained by the people/thing dimensions. Exceptions include greater female interest in veterinary science and cell biology and greater male interest in abstraction, patients, and power/control fields, such as politics and law. These may be due to other factors, such as the ability of a career to provide status or social impact or the availability of alternative careers. As a possible side effect of the partial people/thing relationship, females are more likely to use exploratory and qualitative methods and males are more likely to use quantitative methods. The results suggest that the necessary steps of eliminating explicit and implicit gender bias in academia are insufficient and might be complemented by measures to make fields more attractive to minority genders.     

How Do We Train Our Future Faculty to Teach? A Multidisciplinary Comparison of Graduate-Level Pedagogy Courses Offered at a Large Midwestern University

This study examines and documents graduate pedagogy courses offered at a large Midwestern research university. Thirty-three graduate pedagogy course instructors from 32 departments (a majority of those offering courses) completed an online survey. We report on enrollment demographics, preparation of faculty to teach such a course, and how a statement of teaching philosophy is presented to the class. This research connects the analyses of individual pedagogy courses with the few national studies on teacher training, outlines assumptions about an emerging field, and lays groundwork for a comprehensive study of the landscape and outcomes of graduate pedagogy courses nationwide.     

Treating twins as individuals: Maternal educative practices

For twins’ parents, the process of building up each child’s individuality is more complex than for singleton’s parents. The dyadic interaction becomes a triadic situation and the mother has to face the problem of distinguishing one twin from the other without comparing them. The analysis of mother’s twin care patterns provides highly relevant information on the processes promoting twins’ individualization and maternal adjustment to the triadic situation. An empirical study illustrates this point of view. It surveys forty parents of twins on their attitudes towards twin rearing and observes parental behaviour in the home to assess consistency between statements of actual practices. Observation and correspondence analysis show that: I) Some types of child care are more conductive to implementing differentiation strategies than others (dress and choice of toys in contrast to bedtime and meals); 2) mothers of twins who are explicit about child rearing practices are generally coherent about putting them into practice; mothers with less explicit views are less inclined to try to individualize their twins; 3) SES and degree of physical resemblance between twins both affect the type of differentiation strategies.