Intention and Meaning in Young Children's Drawing

In this article I present some ideas, based on qualitative research into young children's drawing, related to the developing discourse on young children's thinking and meaning making. I question the relationship between perception and conception and the nature of representation, challenging traditional ideas around stage theory and shifting the focus from the drawings themselves to the process of drawing, and thus to the children's own purposes. I analyse examples of my observations (made in naturalistic settings within a nursery classroom) to reveal the range of representational purposes and meaning in children's drawing activity. My analysis shows that, rather than being developmentally determined, the way children configure their drawings is purposeful; children can recognise the power of drawing to represent, and that they themselves can be in control of this. I explore aspects of the process, including transformation and talk to show the importance of understanding drawing in its specific contexts. I show how children's drawing activity is illuminated by the way in which it occurs and the other activities linked to it, presenting drawing as part of children's broader, intentional, meaning‐making activity. As an aspect of the interactive, communicative practices through which children's thinking develops, representation is a constructive, self‐directed, intentional process of thinking in action, through which children bring shape and order to their experience, rather than a developing ability to make visual reference to objects in the world. I suggest that in playing with the process, children are actively defining reality rather than passively reflecting a given reality.     

Investigating the information-seeking behaviour of academic lawyers: From Ellis’s model to design

Information-seeking is important for lawyers, who have access to many dedicated electronic resources. However there is considerable scope for improving the design of these resources to better support information-seeking. One way of informing design is to use information-seeking models as theoretical lenses to analyse users’ behaviour with existing systems. However many models, including those informed by studying lawyers, analyse information-seeking at a high level of abstraction and are only likely to lead to broad-scoped design insights. We illustrate that one potentially useful (and lower-level) model is Ellis’s – by using it as a lens to analyse and make design suggestions based on the information-seeking behaviour of 27 academic lawyers, who were asked to think aloud whilst using electronic legal resources to find information for their work. We identify similar information-seeking behaviours to those originally found by Ellis and his colleagues in scientific domains, along with several that were not identified in previous studies such as ‘updating’ (which we believe is particularly pertinent to legal information-seeking). We also present a refinement of Ellis’s model based on the identification of several levels that the behaviours were found to operate at and the identification of sets of mutually exclusive subtypes of behaviours.     

An interaction-dominant perspective on reading fluency and dyslexia

The background noise of response times is often overlooked in scientific inquiries of cognitive performances. However, it is becoming widely acknowledged in psychology, medicine, physiology, physics, and beyond that temporal patterns of variability constitute a rich source of information. Here, we introduce two complexity measures (1/f scaling and recurrence quantification analysis) that employ background noise as metrics of reading fluency. These measures gauge the extent of interdependence across, rather than within, cognitive components. In this study, we investigated dyslexic and non-dyslexic word-naming performance in beginning readers and observed that these complexity metrics differentiate reliably between dyslexic and average response times and correlate strongly with the severity of the reading impairment. The direction of change in the introduced metrics suggests that developmental dyslexia resides from dynamical instabilities in the coordination among the many components necessary to read, which could explain why dyslexic readers score below average on so many distinct tasks and modalities.     

Peers and Teachers as Sources of Relatedness Perceptions,Motivation, and Affective Responses in Physical Education

Research has demonstrated the importance of relatedness perceptions to self-determined motivation in physical education. Therefore, studies have begun to examine the social factors contributing to feelings of relatedness. The purpose of this study was to examine teacher (perceived emotional support) and peer (acceptance, friendship quality) relationship variables to feelings of relatedness, motivation, and affective responses in junior high physical education students (N = 411). Results revealed that perceived relatedness mediated the relationship between variables and self-determined motivation and related directly to the amount of enjoyment and worry students experienced. These findings demonstrate that relationships with both teachers and peers are important for students' relatedness perceptions, motivation, enjoyment, and worry in physical education.     

Response Times of Slide and Cross-Over Steps as Used by Volleyball Players

Abstract

Basic physical fitness or motor performance functions as expressed in decathlon data are indicated through a factor analytical approach. Data from the eight Olympic decathlon championships since World War II, altogether representing 160 complete starts, are made comparable by standard score transformations within each Olympic decathlon contest. Product moment coefficients are analyzed by principal components and maximum likelihood techniques, and oblique as well as orthogonal rotations are performed. The alternative computing procedures all indicate a four-factor pattern which is interpreted in terms of running speed, explosive arm strength, running endurance, and explosive leg strength. These factors mainly cross-validate those of a previous factor analytical decathlon study and are also indicated to be more generally relevant.     

Consolidation of Pursuit Rotor Learning under Conditions of Induced Arousal

Abstract

The purpose of this investigation was to test the basic tenets of consolidation theory by studying the relationship between arousal and the performance and learning of a pursuit rotor task. Ninety-six subjects (48 men and 48 women) were randomly assigned to one of three induced arousal conditions (control, failure-feedback, and electrical shock). Subjects were given twenty-one 20-second acquisition trials under induced arousal conditions, followed 24 or 48 hours later by nine trials in the absence of induced arousal (trials 22–30). The Spielberger A-trait test was administered before the 21 acquisition trials and the A-state test was given afterward. The results of the A-trait test revealed that arousal conditions were equal in terms of normal anxiety levels, while results of the A-state test demonstrated that subjects under induced arousal conditions were indeed stressed (had higher levels of state anxiety). The 21 acquisition trials (seven three-trial blocks) were analyzed using time on target (TOT) scores to determine the effects of arousal on performance. The results of this analysis revealed reliable differences for sex and trial blocks, but not for arousal. A significant triple interaction among the three main effects was primarily caused by a decrement in performance by the female subjects who received failure-feedback. TOT recall scores failed to reveal a facilitative effect due to arousal as predicted by perseverative consolidation theory. In summary, the results of the investigation provided partial support for the action decrement notion but none for the action increment notion of consolidation theory.