Relationship Between Adjustment and Support Types: Young and Mature-aged Local and International First Year University Students

First year university is an important transition context for students. The present study examined the relationship between adjustment and support types, sources and levels of support, and satisfaction with levels of support, for first year students in an Australian university. Comparisons were made between young (17–21 year olds) and mature-aged students and local and international students. Findings indicate that well-adjusted students reported higher levels of social companionship support than the less adjusted group. Many students would have liked more support overall. In comparison to the local group, international students would have liked to receive more emotional, practical and informational support. The implications for service provision and university strategies are discussed.     

Emotional Feeding and Emotional Eating: Reciprocal Processes and the Influence of Negative Affectivity

Emotional eating, that is, eating more in response to negative mood, is often seen in children. But the origins of emotional eating remain unclear. In a representative community sample of Norwegian 4‐year‐olds followed up at ages 6, 8, and 10 years (analysis sample: n = 801), one potential developmental pathway was examined: a reciprocal relation between parental emotional feeding and child emotional eating. The results revealed that higher levels of emotional feeding predicted higher levels of emotional eating and vice versa, adjusting for body mass index and initial levels of feeding and eating. Higher levels of temperamental negative affectivity (at age 4) increased the risk for future emotional eating and feeding.     

I Have Seen the Future and It Is Not Here Yet …; or,On Being Ambitious for Audience Research

Audience research, after a promising period during which some crucial advances were made, seems to be in decline in several ways, yet its tasks remain as important as ever. This article, originally a presentation at the 2003 Versailles Conference on the Future of Audience Research, makes the case for expanding our vision of the field’s possibilities. To do this, it revisits some of the forgotten achievements of the Uses and Gratifications tradition, offers a critique of the dominant “Hall model” for conceiving media/audience relations, and outlines the key concept of an alternative approach: the concept of a “viewing strategy,” which has been at the heart of the 2003–2004 international project on the reception of The Lord of the Rings.     

A Model of Factors Contributing to STEM Learning and Career Orientation

The purpose of this research was to develop and test a model of factors contributing to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning and career orientation, examining the complex paths and relationships among social, motivational, and instructional factors underlying these outcomes for middle school youth. Social cognitive career theory provided the foundation for the research because of its emphasis on explaining mechanisms which influence both career orientations and academic performance. Key constructs investigated were youth STEM interest, self-efficacy, and career outcome expectancy (consequences of particular actions). The study also investigated the effects of prior knowledge, use of problem-solving learning strategies, and the support and influence of informal educators, family members, and peers. A structural equation model was developed, and structural equation modeling procedures were used to test proposed relationships between these constructs. Results showed that educators, peers, and family-influenced youth STEM interest, which in turn predicted their STEM self-efficacy and career outcome expectancy. STEM career orientation was fostered by youth-expected outcomes for such careers. Results suggest that students’ pathways to STEM careers and learning can be largely explained by these constructs, and underscore the importance of youth STEM interest.     

Linked Data Annotation Without the Pointy Brackets: Introducing Recogito 2

Recogito 2 is an open source annotation tool currently under development by Pelagios, an international initiative aimed at facilitating better linkages between online resources documenting the past. With Recogito 2, we aim to provide an environment for efficient semantic annotation—i.e., the task of enriching content with references to controlled vocabularies—in order to facilitate links between online data. At the same time, we address a perceived gap in the performance of existing tools, by emphasizing the development of mechanisms for manual intervention and editorial control that support the curation of quality data. While Recogito 2 provides an online workspace for general-purpose document annotation, it is particularly well-suited for geo-annotation, in other words annotating documents with references to gazetteers, and supports the annotation of both texts and images (i.e., digitized maps). Already available for testing at http://recogito.pelagios.org, its formal release to the public occurred in December 2016.     

The influence of 2 weeks of low-volume high-intensity interval training on health outcomes in adolescent boys

Abstract

The present study aimed to establish whether 2 weeks of high-intensity interval training would have a beneficial effect on aerobic fitness, fat oxidation, blood pressure and body mass index (BMI) in healthy adolescent boys. Ten adolescent boys (15.1 ± 0.3 years, 1.3 ± 0.2 years post-estimated peak height velocity) completed six sessions of Wingate-style high-intensity interval training over a 2-week period. The first session consisted of four sprints with training progressed to seven sprints in the final session. High-intensity interval training had a beneficial effect on maximal O₂ uptake (mean change, ±90% confidence intervals: 0.19 L · min^?1, ±0.19, respectively), on the O₂ uptake at the gas exchange threshold (0.09 L · min^?1, ±0.13) and on the O₂ cost of sub-maximal exercise (–0.04 L · min^?1, ±0.04). A beneficial effect on the contribution of lipid (0.06 g · min^?1, ±0.06) and carbohydrate (–0.23 g · min^?1, ±0.14) oxidation was observed during sub-maximal exercise, but not for the maximal rate of fat oxidation (0.04 g · min^?1, ±0.08). Systolic blood pressure (1 mmHg, ±4) and BMI (0.1 kg · m², ±0.1) were not altered following training. These data demonstrate that meaningful changes in health outcomes are possible in healthy adolescent boys after just six sessions of high-intensity interval training over a 2-week period.