The Effects of Gender, at-Risk Status, and Number of Years in Preschool on Children's Academic Readiness

While there has been a number of studies examining the effects of preschool as intervention for children of economic poverty and special needs children, there has not been research examining the effects of preschool education for the general population of children. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of years of preschool, gender, and at-risk status on children's readiness for first grade. 4539 children participated in the study. 104 children started public school at three-years-old (K3), 1234started school at age four (K4) and 3201 started at age five. At-risk status was determined using the Cooperative Preschool Inventory (Caldwell, 1974) and first grade readiness was determined using the Metropolitan Readiness Test (MRT; Nurss & McGauvran, 1974). Results of the analyses indicated that children who entered the public school preschool program at K3 or K4 scored significantly higher on the MRT than children who entered at K5. Additionally, the findings indicated that if children started at K3, by the end of kindergarten there was no difference between the at-risk and not-at-risk children's scores on the MRT. This was not true for the K4 or K5 groups. The discussion focuses on two issues. First, the relationship between the benefits of preschool and continuity of programs, and second, that “regular” preschool education may serve as intervention for those children who require it, if attended long enough.     

Attitudinal effects of utilizing a critical method of analysis

Subjects were trained in the use of a critical method for analyzing controversial messages. At a later date the subjects, along with two control groups, listened to a counter‐attitudinal speech. Utilization of the critical method appeared to serve an immunizing function for females, while for males a heightened persuasibility effect was observed.     

THINKING ABOUT CITIZEN JOURNALISM

This study seeks to understand how community newspaper editors negotiate the professional complexities posed by citizen journalism—a phenomenon that, even in the abstract, would appear to undermine their gatekeeping control over content. Through interviews with 29 newspaper editors in Texas, we find that some editors either favor or disfavor the use of citizen journalism primarily on philosophical grounds, while others favor or disfavor its use mainly on practical grounds. This paper presents a mapping of these philosophical-versus-practical concerns as a model for visualizing the conflicting impulses at the heart of a larger professional debate over the place and purpose of user-generated content in the news production process. Moreover, these findings are viewed in light of gatekeeping, which, we argue, offers a welcome point of entry for the study of participatory media work as it evolves at news organizations large and small alike. In contributing to a growing body of literature on user-generated content in news contexts, this study points to the need for better understanding the causes and consequences of journalism's hyperlocal turn, as digitization enables newswork to serve increasingly niche geographic and virtual communities.     

The validity and intra-tester reliability of markerless motion capture to analyse kinematics of the BMX Supercross gate start

The aim of this study was to quantify the validity and intra-tester reliability of a novel method of kinematic measurement. The measurement target was the joint angles of an athlete performing a BMX Supercross (SX) gate start action through the first 1.2 s of movement in situ on a BMX SX ramp using a standard gate start procedure. The method employed GoPro® Hero 4 Silver (GoPro Inc., USA) cameras capturing data at 120 fps 720 p on a ‘normal’ lens setting. Kinovea 0.8.15 (Kinovea.org, France) was used for analysis. Tracking data was exported and angles computed in Matlab (Mathworks®, USA). The gold standard 3D method for joint angle measurement could not safely be employed in this environment, so a rigid angle was used. Validity was measured to be within 2°. Intra-tester reliability was measured by the same tester performing the analysis twice with an average of 55 days between analyses. Intra-tester reliability was high, with an absolute error <6° and <9 frames (0.075 s) across all angles and time points for key positions, respectively. The methodology is valid within 2° and reliable within 6° for the calculation of joint angles in the first ~1.25 s.     

The influence of hold regularity on perceptual-motor behaviour in indoor climbing

Climbers often train on indoor climbing walls, which are modifiable to simulate features of outdoor climbing environments at different levels of difficulty. The aim of this study was to evaluate the influence of regularity of climbing holds on emergent perceptual-motor behaviours. Skilled climbers performed six repetitions of two topographically similar routes on an indoor climbing wall. One route was composed of 18 different types of hand holds (irregular route), whereas the other route had only two types of hand holds (regular route). Preview and climbing durations, as well as visual search behaviours, were recorded. Participants rated the regular route as more difficult to climb, requiring greater perceived effort to complete. The time spent previewing, and then climbing the routes, was reduced on average by 12% and 16%, respectively in the irregular route compared to the regular route. There were more fixations made when climbing the regular route (281 vs. 222 fixations per trial). It seems the climbers were more careful and thorough in their gaze behaviours with the regular route because of the additional technical demands it presented, whereas the irregular route afforded a more superficial visual exploration with use of more frequent saccades between holds. The findings suggest how irregularity in the environment is exploited by skilled climbers, apparently making the practice context easier to perceive and act in.     

Assessing Learning across Pedagogical Modalities and Learning Retrieval Conditions for College Learners in Introductory Psychology

The present study attempted to explore if learning is as effective in the web-based platform as it is in the traditional or web-enhanced modalities. Unlike prior studies that measured learning using course grades and subjective student reporting, this study used an empirical method to develop a valid and reliable measure of learning. Data from 346 college students participating in an introductory psychology course were compared across the three instructional modalities. Consistent with prior research, the results revealed no significant differences on a measure of learning effectiveness between the three learning modalities. Additional analysis of the results was conducted based on the ‘specificity of encoding’ model and indicated that students who retrieved the information in a context congruent with where encoding took place scored significantly lower than those who retrieved the information in an incongruent context. Whereas prior models of learning placed the encoding of information squarely in the classroom context, these results suggested that encoding takes place primarily in the cyber online context. This reconceptualization of the context of encoding suggests that congruous context for encoding and retrieval is when both processes reside in the cyber online context.     

Streams of shared knowledge: computational expansion of knowledge-flow theory

In this article, we investigate empirically the theoretical split between emphases upon specialist vs trans-specialist knowledge in the organization – or more generally between exploitation and exploration – a split that divides knowledge-flow theory at present, and hence represents an important issue for knowledge management (KM). We review the relevant literature, articulate hypotheses, and employ computational experimentation to test them empirically. Our findings provide novel, insightful understanding of the factors that contribute toward understanding the relative balance between specialist vs trans-specialist knowledge in particular, and exploitation vs exploration more generally. We offer three main contributions: (1) we critique extant theory relating to the substitutability of specialist and interspecialist knowledge; (2) we offer new conceptual insight and empirical evidence concerning substitutability of these knowledge types in the organization; and (3) we demonstrate the empirical power of computational experimentation to examine KM questions of both theoretical and practical interest.