Mastery and exercise play interventions: motor skill development and verbal recall of children with and without disabilities

Background: Fundamental motor skill proficiency is essential for engagement in sports and physical play and in the development of a healthy lifestyle. Children with motor delays (with and without disabilities) lack the motor skills necessary to participate in games and physical activity, and tend to spend more time as onlookers than do their peers. As such, intervention programs are crucial in promoting motor skill development of children with motor delays. While mastery climate (MC) interventions have shown to positively impact children’s motor performance, what is unknown is the impact of cognitive strategies used by children within these climates. Furthermore, although vigorous play seems to be related to the development of gross motor skills, it is still unknown if children with and without disabilities would benefit from exercise play (EP) interventions.

Purpose: This study examined the effects of MC and EP interventions on the motor skill development and verbal recall (VR) of children with motor delays. The sample included children with and without disabilities.

Research designs: One hundred and thirty-eight children from 27 urban public schools were referred to the present study. Children were assessed using the Test of Gross Motor Development second edition (TGMD-2) and a VR checklist. Sixty-four children (18 with disabilities and 46 without) met the inclusion criteria, which was a score less than the fifth percentile on the TGMD-2. Participants were randomly assigned to the MC or EP 14-week interventions emphasizing gross motor skill practice.

Data collection and analysis: Children were assessed at pre- and post-intervention. A 2 (groups)?×?2 (disability) × 2 (time) analyses of variance with repeated measures on the last factor was conducted. Change scores, t-test comparisons on the delta scores and Cohen’s D were also calculated.

Results: The MC group demonstrated significant and positive changes over the intervention period. Further, the MC group showed superior locomotor and object control performance and higher recall of verbal cues (p?≤?.05) at post-intervention compared to the EP group. Children with and without disabilities within the MC showed similar patterns of improvement. The EP intervention did not demonstrate significant improvements.

Conclusion: Children with and without disabilities showed improvements in motor skills and VR when exposed to an MC, incorporating the six TARGET structures. These structures included (a) providing feedback and encouragement, providing opportunities for decision-making and establishing personal goals, (b) including parents in the recognition of children’s achievements, (c) creating opportunities to experience leadership and self-pacing, (d) guiding children to use verbal cues and modeling when practicing gross motor skills, and (e) providing demonstrations and teaching children to self-monitor their performance. Instruction is therefore seen as critical to learning gross motor skills, as demonstrated from the findings. Although there were opportunities for vigorous play within the EP intervention, the children did not show improvements in motor performance or VR. These findings suggest that new trends in teacher education physical education to prioritize physical activity over good motor skill instruction may not be advantageous for children in the early years, and should be reconsidered.     

Leisure participation: modelling the decision to engage in sports and culture

Participation in sport and participation in cultural activities are usually studied separately. However, since both activities dominate the leisure time of most individuals, it is reasonable to analyse simultaneously the determinants of participation in both activities. Informed by the economic household theory, this study examined the core factors of time, income, human capital as well as several socio-demographic factors. The results showed that there was as small but significant correlation between sports and cultural participation. Thus, both can be described as complementary and competing activities. Leisure time, gender, education, nationality and subjective well-being were significant predictors of both sports and cultural participation. Differences were found for the variables age and income. This paper also describes the characteristics of those individuals who are not likely to participate in either activity and emphasises the importance of social inclusion programmes.     

Anaphoric reference strategies used in written language productions of deaf teenagers

There are few researchers who analyze written productions by deaf individuals; there are also few researchers who discuss the knowledge these people have about written text comprehension and production. For the present study, the investigators analyzed 16 written productions by four deaf individuals based on the anaphoric reference concept as recently proposed in textual linguistics (see, e.g., I. V. Koch & L. A. Marcuschi, 2002). It is important to show that referential progression is one of the textual aspects capable of giving stability and continuity to written productions; referential progression is also relevant to discursive coherence. The results of the writing analysis in the present study show that deaf individuals can learn to use expressive resources that are available in the Portuguese language and can use reference strategies, as long as these individuals can interact with a partner who knows Portuguese.     

An English-Speaking Prekindergarten Teacher for Young Latino Children: Implications of the Teacher–Child Relationship on Second Language Learning

This case study was designed to describe how an effective English-speaking prekindergarten teacher develops strategies for communicating with and teaching young English language learners. The teacher’s classroom practices to enhance her own relationship with the children promoted opportunities for the Latino children to become full participants in the classroom community. At the end of the year, the Latino children showed progress in formal and informal measures of receptive vocabulary in both English and Spanish. Findings from the study suggest the importance of the affective and social nature of second language learning in young children. Implications for practice and research are discussed.     

Adolescents' Age Preferences for Dating Partners: Support for an Evolutionary Model of Life-History Strategies

The tendency for women to prefer older partners, and for men to prefer younger partners, has frequently been explained in terms of socialization to American sex-role norms specifying that men must be older and more powerful than their female partners. However, recent cross-cultural data reveal this same pattern in all societies studied, a finding more in line with an evolutionary life-history model. The evolutionary model assumes that what is attractive to males is not youth, per se, but features related to fertility. This perspective leads to a hypothesis concerning the development of age preferences among adolescents: teenage males should violate the normative pattern shown in adult males and express interest in females older than themselves. 209 teenagers (103 males, 106 females) ranging in age from 12 to 19 were surveyed regarding the age limits they would find acceptable in a dating partner, as well as the age of a dating partner they would find ideally attractive. Although teenage males were willing to date girls slightly younger than themselves, they indicated a much wider range of acceptability above their own ages, and also reported that their ideally attractive partners would be several years older than themselves. Preferences of teenage females were similar in pattern to those of adult females, ranging, on average, from their own age to several years older. When combined with the consistent adult data obtained from numerous cultures, these data suggest the utility of viewing the development of sex differences in mate preference from the perspective of an evolutionary life-history model.     

An Emic,Mixed-Methods Approach to Defining and Measuring Positive Parenting Among Low-Income Black Families

Research Findings: This within-group exploratory sequential mixed-methods investigation sought to identify how ethnically diverse, urban-residing, low-income Black families conceptualize positive parenting. During the item development phase 119 primary caregivers from Head Start programs participated in focus groups and interviews. These qualitative data were content analyzed using a 3-stage iterative process that resulted in the development of a final set of 72 items for a paper-and-pencil measure. In the measure validation phase of the study initial construct validity of the 72-item measure was assessed with an independent sample of 665 respondents. Common factor analyses revealed 5 dimensions of positive parenting on the Black Parenting Strengths in Context scale that related in expected ways with other parent self-report measures. Practice or Policy: Black Parenting Strengths in Context dimensions provide initial support for a more nuanced operationalization of positive parenting than currently exists in any single scale for use with this group and hold promise for better honoring the culture- and context-specific parenting goals and practices that low-income Black parents subjectively view as important for producing healthy developmental outcomes for their children.     

The specific involvement of verbal and visuospatial working memory in hypermedia learning

Many models have hypothesized that multimedia comprehension requires the concurrent processing of verbal and visuospatial information by limited information processing systems. However, in spite of the emphasis devoted to the concurrent processing of verbal and visuospatial information, little research has so far investigated the specific role played by verbal and visuospatial abilities in multimedia comprehension. The present paper aims to study the specific involvement of verbal and visuospatial working memory in multimedia learning. Ninety‐two students (39 boys and 53 girls) from a middle school in a small city in the northeast of Italy, were asked to learn new information on the physical and social geography of Germany from a hypermedium. Participants were also required to perform a reading comprehension test, two short‐term memory tasks, and two working memory tasks, which assessed either verbal or visuospatial memory. The results support the hypothesis that both verbal and visuospatial working memory sub‐components play a role in hypermedium processing, but with specific and distinct functions: the performance in the verbal working memory task was able to predict the semantic knowledge children can derive from hypermedia learning. In contrast, visuospatial working memory seemed to have lower connections to the semantic knowledge children derived from a hypermedia document, whereas its role emerged in the ability to construct a representation of the document structure.     

CONTEXTUAL PREDICTORS OF SELF‐DETERMINED ACTIONS IN STUDENTS WITH AND WITHOUT INTELLECTUAL DISABILITY

Research in the field of intellectual disability suggests that promotion of self‐determination triggers positive transition outcomes for youth with intellectual disability. This article examines the contributions of personal and environmental variables in predicting self‐determined action in students with and without intellectual disability. The Spanish pilot versions of the Self‐Determination Inventory and the AIR Self‐Determination Scale were administered to 114 youth with and without intellectual disability. Personal and environmental variables were treated as predictor variables for analytic purposes. The results indicate the relevance of environmental variables in predicting both self‐reported capacity for self‐determination and the essential characteristics of self‐determined action. Particularly, age and opportunities at school and at home to engage in self‐determined action played a significant role. The practical implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.