Childhood Physical Fitness and Performance as Predictors of High School Sport Participation

ABSTRACT

Participation in youth sport is positively associated with physical fitness and performance. The purpose of the current study was to examine if physical fitness measures during childhood and early adolescence predicted high school sport participation. Participants included youth in the Michigan State University Motor Performance Study. Measures consisted of the endurance shuttle run, Wells sit-and-reach, jump and reach, standing long jump, agility shuttle run and 30-yard dash. Individual, generalized estimating equation models were used to estimate the association between each measure and the odds of participating in high school sport. For both sexes, the endurance shuttle run and agility shuttle run were related to sport participation. For boys only, the long jump and 30-yard dash were also associated with sport participation. Better physical fitness and performance across several dimensions in childhood, including those related to motor skills, enhanced the likelihood of sport participation in high school.     

Difficulty and self-efficacy: An exploratory study

Serious games are becoming increasingly popular due to their association with increased learning outcomes when compared to traditional self-regulated learning activities. However, the majority of research examining the outcomes of serious games has focused almost exclusively on learning outcomes. This has resulted in a lack of research examining why these types of games result in increased positive outcomes, such as engagement or performance. This study seeks to address this gap in existing research by examining the relationship between game difficulty and participants’ engagement, performance and self-efficacy in a Pacman style maze navigation game. This required the use of hidden difficulty variations which participants were randomly assigned. Participants engaged with the game over a 5-days practice period. Results from this study suggest that difficulty plays a considerable role in influencing participants’ self-efficacy for the task. Self-efficacy has been consistently linked to positive outcomes such as increased engagement and performance. This highlights the importance of difficulty as a game design factor as well as providing an insight into the manner in which serious games could be further refined in order to increase user’s self-efficacy and associated positive outcomes. Implications for future serious games and self-efficacy research are discussed.     

Blended learning in higher education: professional development in a Hong Kong university

ABSTRACT

Online learning has become a ubiquitous part of the educational landscape and how teachers are supported in developing approaches to teaching online is a fundamental aspect of the students’ learning experience. Based on the implementation of a professional development course on becoming an online teacher offered in a blended learning mode at one university in Hong Kong, this article proposes that offering this type of professional development in a blended mode is very effective in facilitating enhanced usage of the university’s learning management system. In a blended mode, teachers are actively engaged with blended learning and were found to make more extensive use of features/tools in Blackboard after they attended the professional development course. Results support that offering professional development in a blended mode provides teachers with an authentic student perspective, at the same time as they take guided steps in the teacher’s role in blended learning.     

Defining professional needs in early childhood education

This article describes a research project, ‘Improving Learning: The Pupils' Agenda’ (supported by the Nuffield Foundation) in which a team of researchers from Homerton College, Cambridge and the University of Keele, investigated how schools were listening and responding to pupils' perspectives on effective teaching and learning. An account of the project is presented, outlining how the team carried out the investigation and the three themes on which was based. The article goes on to look at the strategies being developed in primary schools, using extracts from the data to illustrate the impact of these strategies in schools. In conclusion it is suggested that the answer to the question posed in the title — can listening and responding to pupils' views give new directions for school improvement — is clearly ‘yes’ and that the advantage of taking this approach lies principally in its potential for improving pupils' attitudes to learning.     

Mnemonic-strategy reduction of prose-learning interference

One hundred and sixty college students read three fictitious biographical passages according to either imagery-mnemonic or no-strategy control instructions. In one mnemonic condition, subjects formed separate images involving each biographical name and its associated facts: in another mnemonic condition, the biographical name and its associated facts were integrated within a single composite image. Relative to an interference-control condition, integrated mnemonic subjects recalled more factual information, whereas separate mnemonic subjects did not. In addition, the recall of integrated mnemonic subjects was statistically no different from that of a noninterference control condition, whereas the recall of separate mnemonic subjects was lower. Both theoretical and educational implications of the results are discussed. The first author’s contribution to this work was supported by an Organized Research Grant from the Graduate School of Illinois State University. The second author’s contribution was supported by the National Institute of Education under Grant No. NIE-G-81-0009 to the Wisconsin Center for Education Research and was facilitated by a Romnes Faculty Fellowship from the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.     

Designing informal learning experiences for early career academics using a knowledge ecosystem model

This article presents a ‘knowledge ecosystem’ model of how early career academics experience using information to learn while building their social networks for developmental purposes. Developed using grounded theory methodology, the model offers a way of conceptualising how to empower early career academics through (1) agency (individual and relational) and (2) facilitation of personalised informal learning (design of physical and virtual systems and environments) in spaces where developmental relationships are formed, including programmes, courses, events, community, home and social media. It is suggested that the knowledge ecosystem model is suitable for use in designing informal learning experiences for early career academics.     

Parent question use during shared reading time: How does training affect question type and frequency?

This study was designed to examine whether participation in a shared reading workshop alters the frequency with which parents ask their children questions during book reading sessions, particularly questions designed to strengthen component reading skills that they may not have known about before training. Participants in the reading workshop series (N = 57) were taught strategies for asking questions about story content and word structure to build children's language and literacy skills. Findings suggest that parents may be somewhat familiar with traditional dialogic reading strategies focused on story content and utilize them without instruction, whereas parents may be less knowledgeable about sound or print‐focused skills and do not employ strategies focused on word structure until instructed to do so. It is also notable that parents do not use all story content prompts equally. This information can be used by school psychologists to refine the messages educators share with parents about how to best support their children's reading development.