Cognitive Stimulation at Home and in Child Care and Children’s Preacademic Skills in Two-Parent Families

This paper used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (N = 1,258) to examine the influence of hilevels of cognitive stimulation from mothers, fathers, and childcare providers at 24 months and children’s pre-academic skills at 48 and 60 months in two parent families. Results from path analysis showed direct positive effects of fathers’ early cognitive stimulation on early reading and math skills at 48 and 60 months. There were also two moderated effects: The effects of high levels of maternal stimulation at 24 months on early math and reading skills at 48 months were largest for children also receiving high levels of cognitive stimulation from their childcare providers. Implications for including fathers in studies of the home cognitive stimulation and strengthening the parent-childcare connection are discussed.     

Haemoglobin A1c-based screening for prediabetes and diabetes mellitus: a multi-center study in Croatian adult population

IntroductionBased on the hypothesis that there is a substantial rate of adults with prediabetes and undiagnosed diabetes mellitus (DM), our aim was to perform haemoglobin A1c (HbA_1c)-based screening in a cohort of Croatian adults and estimate the prevalence of prediabetes and undiagnosed DM according to American Diabetes Association criteria.Materials and methodsThis multi-center, cross-sectional study performed in six Croatian hospitals included 5527 patients aged 40 to 70 years admitted to the Emergency Department or undergoing a primary care check-up. Haemoglobin A1c was measured from leftover whole blood samples using the enzymatic method on either Alinity c or Architect c-series analyser (Abbott Laboratories, Chicago, USA). Haemoglobin A1c between 39-47 mmol/mol was classified as prediabetes, while ≥ 48 mmol/mol as undiagnosed DM.ResultsAfter exclusion of 435 patients with known DM, the final cohort included 5092 patients (median age 57; 56% males). A total of 882 (17.3%) patients had HbA_1c values between 39 and 47 mmol/mol. There were 214 (4.2%) patients with HbA_1c ≥ 48 mmol/mol. Prediabetes prevalence ranged from 14.2% to 20.5%, while undiagnosed DM from 3.3% to 7.3%, with statistically significant differences among settings (P < 0.001). Age-stratified analysis showed that prediabetes and undiagnosed DM prevalence increase with age (P < 0.001), being 25.4% and 5.8%, respectively, in patients aged 60 to 70 years.ConclusionUnderlying impairment of glucose metabolism was identified in about one in five adults, with significant number of patients with already overt DM. These results should serve as a starting point for further steps directed towards promotion of preventive measures for DM in Croatia.     

‘Homeschooling’ and the COVID-19 Crisis: The Insights of Parents on Curriculum and Remote Learning

Interchange - The COVID-19 crisis forced schools to temporarily close from March 2020 to June 2020, producing unpredictable changes in instructional contexts and patterns. A new concept of...     

Creating and Sustaining a Culture of Excellence: Insights From Accomplished University Team-Sport Coaches

Purpose: Winning several national championships is an extraordinary feat that very few university coaches have accomplished. The objective of this study was to investigate how some of Canada’s most accomplished university team-sport coaches created and sustained a culture of excellence in their programs. Method: Six university coaches who had won more than 30 national titles participated in this study. Each coach participated in a semistructured interview, and the qualitative data were inductively analyzed using a thematic analysis. Results: The coaches noted that hard work and daily attention to detail, effective emotional management of themselves and their athletes, and continuous self-assessment (self-reflection and seeking mentors) were crucial elements that led to sustained excellence in their programs. Conclusions: This study offers one of the first empirical accounts of how highly successful university coaches developed and maintained a culture of excellence and success in their high-performance sport setting.     

Personalization by website transformation: Theory and practice

We present an analysis of a progressive series of out-of-turn transformations on a hierarchical website to personalize a user’s interaction with the site. We formalize the transformation in graph-theoretic terms and describe a toolkit we built which enumerates all of the traversals enabled by every possible complete series of these transformations in any site and computes a variety of metrics while simulating each traversal therein to qualify the relationship between a site’s structure and the cumulative effect of support for the transformation in a site. We employed this toolkit in two websites. The results indicate that the transformation enables users to experience a vast number of paths through a site not traversable through browsing and demonstrate that it supports traversals with multiple steps, where the semblance of a hierarchy is preserved, as well as shortcuts directly to the desired information.     

The interplay between work engagement,workaholism, emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction in academics: A person‐centred approach to the study of occupational well‐being and its relations with job hindrances and job challenges in an Italian university

The aim of this study was to analyse the occupational well‐being of academics by using a person‐centred approach. Data was collected by an online self‐report questionnaire involving the academic population of a large Italian university. Cluster analysis showed the presence of four significantly different clusters, that were labelled engaged‐satisfied, engaged‐workaholic, exhausted‐workaholic and detached. Multivariate analysis of variances showed significant differences between clusters regarding well‐being dimensions, and the perception of work demand on academics as sources of hindrance or challenge. The findings of this study suggested, for the first time, the existence of a well‐being typology within the academic context, considering aspects, such as workaholism, that have been rarely taken into account. Moreover, it has been shown that the well‐being profile can influence the way in which academics perceived academic work demands, highlighting the potentialities of analysing well‐being profile in order to identify employees who are more or less at risk.     

Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and practice: Balancing expectations of the ‘old’ academy with the future model of universities as ‘problem solvers’

Academics are increasingly required to balance the expectations of the ‘old’ academy with a future model of universities as interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary ‘problem solvers’. This paper highlights changing expectations of academics in producing alternative research outcomes in collaborative, practice‐based research. Through a series of workshops with 20 researchers, preferred research outcomes and tensions in achieving these outcomes were identified. The tensions identified are presented as three dichotomies comprising the tension between: (a) ‘I versus We’ ‐ individual versus team expectations & outcomes. (b) Disciplinary outcomes versus inter‐/transdisciplinary outcomes. (c) Learning versus research objectives for the students and academics involved. These tensions reflect the authors' experiences of working in three international sustainability projects, drawing on lessons learned from these projects, with recommendations for universities seeking to implement interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary doctoral and postdoctoral programmes. Recommendations include the need for formal and informal leadership models, strong communication skills, empathy and willingness to learn from each other. A need for more systemic changes within university administration to better reward and value the breadth and depth of collaborative work, while facilitating open learning cultures and practice‐oriented learning opportunities and curricula across faculties was also identified.     

Foot strike patterns of recreational and sub-elite runners in a long-distance road race

Although the biomechanical properties of the various types of running foot strike (rearfoot, midfoot, and forefoot) have been studied extensively in the laboratory, only a few studies have attempted to quantify the frequency of running foot strike variants among runners in competitive road races. We classified the left and right foot strike patterns of 936 distance runners, most of whom would be considered of recreational or sub-elite ability, at the 10 km point of a half-marathon/marathon road race. We classified 88.9% of runners at the 10 km point as rearfoot strikers, 3.4% as midfoot strikers, 1.8% as forefoot strikers, and 5.9% of runners exhibited discrete foot strike asymmetry. Rearfoot striking was more common among our sample of mostly recreational distance runners than has been previously reported for samples of faster runners. We also compared foot strike patterns of 286 individual marathon runners between the 10 km and 32 km race locations and observed increased frequency of rearfoot striking at 32 km. A large percentage of runners switched from midfoot and forefoot foot strikes at 10 km to rearfoot strikes at 32 km. The frequency of discrete foot strike asymmetry declined from the 10 km to the 32 km location. Among marathon runners, we found no significant relationship between foot strike patterns and race times.