Learning and remembering strategies of novice and advanced jazz dancers for skill level appropriate dance routines

This study examined the influence of the challenge level of to-be-learned stimulus on learning strategies in novice and advanced dancers. In Study 1, skill-level appropriate dance routines were developed for novice and advanced jazz dancers. In Study 2, 8 novice and 9 advanced female jazz dancers attempted to learn and remember the two routines in mixed model factorial design, with one between-participants factor: skill level (novice or advanced) and two within-participants factors: routine (easy or difficult) and performance (immediate or delayed). Participants were interviewed regarding the strategies used to learn and remember the routines. Results indicated that advanced performers used atypical learning strategies for insufficiently challenging stimuli, which may reflect characteristics of the stimuli rather than the performer. The qualitative data indicate a clear preference of novice and advanced performers for spatial compatibility of stimuli and response.     

Data assemblages,sentient schools and digitised health and physical education (response to Gard)

Michael Gard raises some important issues in his opinion piece on digitised health and physical education (HPE) in the school setting. His piece represents the beginning of a more critical approach to the instrumental and solutionist perspectives that are currently offered on digitised HPE. Few commentators in education, health promotion or sports studies have begun to realise the extent to which digital data surveillance and analytics are now encroaching into many social institutions and settings and the ways in which actors and agencies in the digital knowledge economy are appropriating these data. Identifying what is happening and the implications for the concepts of selfhood, body and social relations, not to mention the more specific issues of privacy and the commercialisation and exploitation of personal data, requires much greater attention than these issues have previously received in the critical social research literature. While Gard has begun to do this in his article, there is much more to discuss. In this response, I present some discussion that seeks to provide a complementary commentary on the broader context in which digitised HPE is developing and manifesting. Whether or not one takes a position that is techno-utopian, dystopian or somewhere in between, I would argue that to fully understand the social, cultural and political resonances of digitised HPE, such contextualising is vital.     

Required Collaborative Work in Online Courses: A Predictive Modeling Approach

This article describes a predictive model that assesses whether a student will have greater perceived learning in group assignments or in individual work. The model produces correct classifications 87.5% of the time. The research is notable in that it is the first in the education literature to adopt a predictive modeling methodology using data collected via a designed experiment. All subjects experienced both a collaborative and an individual assignment, thus mitigating uncontrolled external factors in the measurement of differences in perceived learning. The exploratory nature of the work prompted the use of Partial Least Squares Regression for estimation. The work serves as an illustration of how predictive modeling might enlighten those in educational and academic settings.