Trait self-esteem and claimed self-handicapping motives in sports situations

Abstract

We examined the relationship between physical self-esteem and claimed self-handicapping among athletes by taking motives into consideration. In Study 1, 99 athletes were asked to report their tendency to engage in claimed self-handicapping for self-protective and self-enhancement motives (trait measures). Low self-esteem athletes reported a higher tendency to engage in claimed self-handicapping for these two motives compared with high self-esteem athletes. Neither low nor high self-esteem athletes reported a preference for one motive over the other. In Study 2, 107 athletes participated in a test that was ostensibly designed to assess high physical abilities – and thus to encourage self-handicapping for self-enhancement motives (success-meaningful condition) – or to assess low physical abilities, and thus to encourage self-handicapping for self-protective motives (failure-meaningful condition). Before starting the test, athletes were given the opportunity to claim handicaps that could impair their performance. Low self-esteem athletes claimed more handicaps than high self-esteem athletes in both conditions. Findings suggest that low physical self-esteem athletes engage more in claimed handicapping regardless of motives, relative to high physical self-esteem athletes.     

Implications of task structure on self‐regulated learning and achievement

School tasks interact with student motivation, cognition, and instruction to influence learning and achievement. Heeding calls for additional research linking motivational and cognitive factors in learning and instruction on specific tasks within authentic classroom settings we quantitatively and qualitatively track 90 tenth‐grade science students’ motivation, reported use of learning strategies, achievement, calibration, and task perceptions as they engage in a well‐structured task (WST) and an ill‐structured task (IST). Students achieved higher grades on, and reported more ease and value for, the WST whereas they utilised critical thinking and peer learning strategies more on the IST. Lower academic achievers calibrated their achievement less accurately on each task and experienced lower grades, interest, ease, and management capability on the IST. Conversely, higher academic achieving students reported more self‐efficacy and effort regulation and lower anxiety and elaboration on the IST. Motivation – notably less intrinsic goal orientation in low academic achievers and higher task value and self‐efficacy – predicted performance on the IST. The structure of tasks may provide prompts that illicit unique self‐regulated learning responses in students.     

Videos as learning objects in MOOCs: A study of specialist and non-specialist participants' video activity in MOOCs

Despite the emergence of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and the field of MOOC research, we have a limited understanding of the specific needs of different learner groups and how MOOCs can successfully address those needs. Video lectures and demonstrations are a central learning component of MOOCs. This paper contributes to the research community by examining the use of MOOC videos for two groups of learners. In particular, we explore whether there is an observable difference between specialists' and non-specialists' video-watching activity. We analyse data collected from three MOOCs on the edX platform. Our findings indicate that while age and educational background impacts the level of video activity, there is no significant difference between specialists and non-specialists. We conclude that the MOOC format may be suited to non-specialist groups, allowing them to self-direct their learning and utilise videos as educational resources.     

QCS: A system for querying, clustering and summarizing documents

Information retrieval systems consist of many complicated components. Research and development of such systems is often hampered by the difficulty in evaluating how each particular component would behave across multiple systems. We present a novel integrated information retrieval system—the Query, Cluster, Summarize (QCS) system—which is portable, modular, and permits experimentation with different instantiations of each of the constituent text analysis components. Most importantly, the combination of the three types of methods in the QCS design improves retrievals by providing users more focused information organized by topic.We demonstrate the improved performance by a series of experiments using standard test sets from the Document Understanding Conferences (DUC) as measured by the best known automatic metric for summarization system evaluation, ROUGE. Although the DUC data and evaluations were originally designed to test multidocument summarization, we developed a framework to extend it to the task of evaluation for each of the three components: query, clustering, and summarization. Under this framework, we then demonstrate that the QCS system (end-to-end) achieves performance as good as or better than the best summarization engines.Given a query, QCS retrieves relevant documents, separates the retrieved documents into topic clusters, and creates a single summary for each cluster. In the current implementation, Latent Semantic Indexing is used for retrieval, generalized spherical k-means is used for the document clustering, and a method coupling sentence “trimming” and a hidden Markov model, followed by a pivoted QR decomposition, is used to create a single extract summary for each cluster. The user interface is designed to provide access to detailed information in a compact and useful format.Our system demonstrates the feasibility of assembling an effective IR system from existing software libraries, the usefulness of the modularity of the design, and the value of this particular combination of modules.     

Inhibition,Integrity and Etiquette Among Online Learners: The Art of Niceness

Recent research on online learning has explored the dense fabric of social presence giving us a better understanding of the rhythms of the teaching-learning exchange. Quantitative studies, especially, have concluded with calls for deeper, more intensive explorations into what happens in online learning environments (Rourke, Anderson, Garrison, & Archer, Journal of Distance Education, 14 (2), 50-71, 1999 ). In this paper, the results of an interpretive study conducted among mature university learners engaged in online study reveal learners' strong affinity to a code of online etiquette. On the demanding front lines of online learning, these learners valued and constructed ways of "being nice" to their fellow learners, creating tolerable levels of harmony and community within which to complete their studies successfully.     

Is phonology bypassed in normal or dyslexic development?

A pervasive assumption in most accounts of normal reading and spelling development is that phonological coding is important early in development but is subsequently superseded by faster, orthographic coding which bypasses phonology. We call this assumption, which derives from dual process theory, the developmental bypass hypothesis. The present study tests four specific predictions of the developmental bypass hypothesis by comparing dyslexics and nondyslexics from the same families in a cross-sectional design. The four predictions are: 1) That phonological coding skill develops early in normal readers and soon reaches asymptote, whereas orthographic coding skill has a protracted course of development; 2) that the correlation of adult reading or spelling performance with phonological coding skill is considerably less than the correlation with orthographic coding skill; 3) that dyslexics who are mainly deficient in phonological coding skill should be able to bypass this deficit and eventually close the gap in reading and spelling performance; and 4) that the greatest differences between dyslexics and developmental controls on measures of phonological coding skill should be observed early rather than late in development. None of the four predictions of the developmental bypass hypothesis were upheld. Phonological coding skill continued to develop in nondyslexics until adulthood. It accounted for a substantial (32–53 percent) portion of the variance in reading and spelling performance in adult nondyslexics, whereas orthographic coding skill did not account for a statistically reliable portion of this variance. The dyslexics differed little across age in phonological coding skill, but made linear progress in orthographic coding skill, surpassing spelling-age (SA) controls by adulthood. Nonetheless, they didnot close the gap in reading and spelling performance. Finally, dyslexics were significantly worse than SA (and Reading Age [RA]) controls in phonological coding skill only in adulthood. This research was supported by the following grants to the first author: A NIMH RSDA (MH00419-05) and project grants from NIMH (MH38820-04), NICHD (HD19423-02) and the March of Dimes (12-135). Author Smith’s work was supported by a project grant from NICHD (HD 19423-02).     

Visions and realities of Internet use in schools: Canadian perspectives

Teachers in many countries are being expected to use the Internet in their work. Research on the Canadian experience of Internet implementation provides insights that may be valuable for researchers and educators in other countries. A three‐year study, using both quantitative and qualitative approaches, examined both the visions for Internet use and the realities of everyday practice related to Internet use in Canadian schools. Participants in the study included ministry of education officials, teacher association officials, classroom teachers, and school administrators. Findings of the study suggest that all four participant groups were positive about the visions of the Internet as a tool with the potential to contribute to the enhancement of teaching and the development of information literate students. The realities of Internet use, however, were quite different from the visions. All four participant groups reported that the Internet was being used mostly to increase access to information. Its potential as an innovative learning tool for students and for teachers was largely unrealised. Few respondents reported using the collaboration, creation, and dissemination capabilities of the Internet. This outcome appeared to be the result of limited infrastructure support, difficulties in infusing Internet use into curriculum, and lack of appropriate teacher professional development.