A comparison of the capacity of ice hockey goaltender masks for the protection from puck impacts

Goaltenders in ice hockey are the only players that are on the ice for the entire game. Their position exposes them to impacts from collisions with other players, falls to the ice, and puck impacts. In competitive ice hockey leagues, head injuries resulting from puck impacts have been reported with some cases resulting in ending the player’s career. Considerable research has been conducted to assess the performance of hockey helmets; however, few have assessed the performance of goaltenders’ masks. The purpose of this study was to compare the capacity of four goaltenders’ masks for the protection from puck impact as measured by head acceleration and peak force. A Hybrid III headform was fitted with four different goaltender masks and impacted with a hockey puck in three locations at 25 m/s. The masks were found to vary in the level of protection they offered as the mask with the thickest liner resulted in lower forces than the thinnest mask for side impacts; however, the thinnest mask resulted in the lowest force for front impacts. Despite performance differences at specific locations, no one mask proved to be superior as peak acceleration and peak force values did not exceed the thresholds necessary for concussion.     

A Self‐Management Strategy for Increasing Implementation of Behavioural Procedures by Residential Staff

Two preliminary studies explored the use of a self‐management strategy as a component of a training program for residential Child and Family Workers. The self‐management strategy comprised the Correspondence Training procedures of Risley (1977) and the formulation of specific implementation plans (Sanders & Glynn, 1981). Experiment 1 found that prompting staff to formulate plans of how they would implement target behaviour management skills and providing individual feedback on their performance in accordance with their plans resulted in gains in implementation of target skills; no gains in implementation resulted from Instruction and Group Feedback conditions alone. This experiment examined pooled data from 18 staff collected by regular time sampled observations. Experiment 2 introduced similar procedures in a multiple baseline design to four volunteer staff, each of whom selected two target behavioural skills from the training manual. The self‐management strategy resulted in clear gains in implementation of these self‐selected target skills by all four staff. Results are discussed in terms of the potential of the correspondence training paradigm and the formulation of specific implementation plans as an approach to on‐the‐job training of residential staff.     

Letters

Conclusions One of the things particularly disturbing about managing our doctoral programs is the growing realization that our professionals must be more highly trained than those working in the traditional social or physical sciences. It takes longer (and I suspect it is more difficult) to produce the hybrid professional capable of and committed to contributing to educational practice. Our students must be as knowledgeable as the doctoral candidate in (for example) psychology and in addition must acquire a set of skills that deal with enhancing practice in a great variety of settings. It also is disturbing to realize that our doctoral students probably won’t acquire this capability unless faculty members begin to model the skills and approaches they expect their students to acquire. I have consciously ignored a number of areas (curriculum, focus for courses and assessment, and delineation of desirable competencies and performances). At the moment my concern is to communicate my strong belief that we must grow away from the training of people primarily concerned with technical skills in developing instruction, evaluating programs, managing resource centers, and producing films and television programs and focus on the training of people skilled in inquiring about problems and their solutions. Presumably these people would be able to arrive at some solutions that would be useful regardless of their career choices—research, development, production, and/or administration. All student activities involving the actual development of instruction should be conducted in an atmosphere of constant inquiry and critical discussion of the usefulness of the concepts being acquired and the process being employed.     

Children's Academic and Behavioral Adjustment as a Function of the Chronicity and Proximity of Peer Rejection

The experience of peer rejection is associated with a number of concurrent and later problems for children. However, we know very little about differences in risk relative to different experiences of rejection over time. This study examined later academic and behavioral problems as a function of two dimensions by which rejection may vary over time: chronicity and temporal proximity. 622 second- through fourth-grade children (ages 7–12) were tested in the spring of 4 consecutive years. The results indicated that both chronicity and proximity directly influenced later adjustment. Taken together, the findings suggest that all levels of rejection were associated with greater absenteeism from school, and more chronic and proximal experiences of rejection were associated with elevated externalizing behavior problems and teacher-rated internalizing behavior problems. There was evidence that initial level of adjustment, gender, and development moderated the relation among these dimensions of rejection and later adjustment.     

The Relationship Between Counselors’ Multicultural Counseling Competence and Poverty Beliefs

The authors explored the relationship between counselors’ multicultural counseling competence (MCC), poverty beliefs, and select demographic factors. Results of hierarchical linear regressions indicate that MCC is predictive of counselor individualistic and structural poverty beliefs. Implications for counselor multicultural training and immersion and future research directions are included.     

Literacy development in deaf students: case studies in bilingual teaching and learning

A bilingual model has been applied to educating deaf students who are learning American Sign Language (ASL) as their first language and written English as a second. Although Cummins's (1984) theory of second-language learning articulates how learners draw on one language to acquire another, implementing teaching practices based on this theory, particularly with deaf students, is a complex, confusing process. The purposes of the present study were to narrow the gap between theory and practice and to describe the teaching and learning strategies used by the teachers and parents of three elementary school children within a bilingual/bicultural learning environment for deaf students. The findings suggest that strategies such as using ASL as the language of instruction and making translation conceptual rather than literal contribute to literacy learning. Findings further indicate that some inconsistencies persist in applying a bilingual approach with deaf students.     

Identifying the training experiences and needs of bilingual school psychologists

The purpose of this pilot study was to better understand the training experiences of bilingual school psychologists (BSPs) and identify their training needs in the provision of psychological services to English language learner students. The secondary aims of the study were to determine how school psychology programs can better prepare BSPs and incorporate best practices in bilingual competencies into their training models. Six BSPs (Spanish/English‐speakers) participated in the study; findings revealed four themes related to their training experiences: (a) programmatic limitations, (b) assumption that language equals competence, (c) going beyond the classroom, and (d) experiential training. In addition, as a result of their training experiences, the BSPs provided training recommendations in two major areas: (a) trainers and (b) culturally relevant curriculum. Implications for school psychology trainers will be provided.     

Infants parse dynamic action

As observers of human behavior, infants are faced with a complex flow of motion in which pauses are rare and only occasionally coincide with boundaries between intentional actions. Two studies investigated whether, despite such complexity, 10- to 11-month-old infants (N = 16 for each study) possess skills for parsing ongoing behavior along boundaries correlated with the initiation and completion of intentions. After being familiarized with digitized sequences of continuous everyday action, infants showed renewed interest in test versions in which motion paused in the midst of an actor's pursuit of intentions (interrupting test videos). In contrast, pauses that suspended motion at intention boundary points (completing test videos) sparked no such renewed interest on infants' part. Moreover, basic salience differences between the two types of test videos were not the source of infants' increased interest when intentions were interrupted (Study 2). These findings demonstrate that infants readily detect disruptions of the structure inherent in intentional action, and hence parse ongoing behavior with respect to such structure. Such parsing skill is likely a prerequisite to the development of genuine intentional understanding.