Role Distance in Question: When it is No Longer Participating But Winning Which is Important

The purpose of this study, which follows on from previous work, is to show in what ways sport has surreptitiously changed and become more complex, to the extent that its functioning only imperfectly responds to one of the basics of sport as envisaged by Elias: role distance. That is the propensity of the participants to avoid being caught in the game, which is only a game, defining in this way the social distance which classes sports performers and the relationship of their practice to the contingencies and material necessities of life. The choice of this focal point is another attempt to understand what happens when sport, by transforming itself, becomes more than sport or even another type of sport. In other words, here we wish to discover what makes Elias' model incomplete. Although sport is supposed to contribute to the pacification of social relations, there are still a large number of elements, which in sporting practice, and in its most recent developments, cannot be explained by the theory of the ‘civilising process’.     

Vertigo in downhill mountain biking and road cycling

Vertigo has been described after the practice of mountain bike. This study aimed to investigate the prevalence of vertigo following competitions or training sessions of downhill mountain biking (DMB) or road cycling (RC). One hundred and two DMB riders, 79 road cyclists and 73 control participants filled in a survey intended to evaluate the prevalence of vertigo in daily living activities and following competitions or training sessions. Vertigo causal factors (crashes, head trauma, fatigue, characteristics of the path/road ridden) were recorded. DMB riders and road cyclists did not report more vertigo during daily living activities than controls. But DMB riders older than 30 had more risk to report vertigo than age-matched road cyclists (OR: 5.06, 95% CI: 1.23–20.62). Road cyclists aged between 20 and 29 were 2.59-fold (95% CI: 1.06–6.27) more likely to report vertigo than controls. After competitions and training sessions, DMB riders were 2.33-fold (95% CI: 1.22–4.41) more likely to report vertigo than road cyclists. Vertigo causal factors were crash with head trauma in DMB riders and fatigue in road cyclists. Vertigo during daily living activities may be of concern for cyclists, particularly older DMB riders. The accumulation of impacts (crashes, vibrations) during the career of a DMB rider may generate micro-traumatisms of the central nervous system and/or peripheral vestibular structures, particularly the otolith organs. In RC, the pathophysiological mechanisms generating vertigo might be effort-related disturbance of homeostasis. To avoid injuries, DMB riders should be aware that vertigo may occur at the end of training sessions or competitions.     

European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System: An Alternative Way to Calculate the ECTS Grades

The European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) has been developed and instituted to facilitate student mobility and academic recognition. This paper presents, discuss, and illustrates the pertinence and the limitation of the current statistical distribution of the ECTS grades, and we propose an alternative way to calculate the ECTS grades attribution in order to improve the ECTS system.     

Observation du mathematicien: Aide a l'enseignement et a la Demonstration Automatique de Theoremes

Quelques mathématiciens ont été observés en train de résoudre des problèmes. Leurs protocoles sont décrits et analysés dans le but d'en dégager des idées susceptibles d'améliorer l'enseignement d'une part, de faire progresser la Démonstration Automatique de Théorèmes d'autre part.     

Neural Correlates of Risk Processing Among Adolescents: Influences of Parental Monitoring and Household Chaos

Adolescent risky behavior is related to developmental changes in decision‐making processes and their neural correlates. Yet, research investigating how the family environment relates to risk processing in the adolescent brain is limited. In this study, longitudinal data were collected from 167 adolescents (13–15 years, 53% male) who self‐reported household chaos and their parent's monitoring practices, and completed a decision‐making task during functional MRI at Time 1 and Time 2 (1 year apart). Parental knowledge was positively related to insular risk processing only among adolescents in low‐chaos environments at both time points. Results highlight environmental correlates of insular risk processing in the developing brain.     

Facing the problem of unbalanced development of knowledge across sectors and fields: the case of the knowledge base in primary education

This paper aims at developing a framework to analyse the structure and the dynamics of the knowledge base in the education sector. The main purpose is to explain why the creation and circulation of knowledge do not work well and what kind of transformations should be implemented at the system level to improve the process of knowledge advances. Three main issues are at stake: the interface between science (in this case, the educational research) and technology (the practical knowledge used by teachers), the low level of codification, which hampers the access to and the expansion of the professional knowledge base and the incentive problems posed by the need for knowledge and innovation diffusion across classrooms and schools.     

La gestion des contre-arguments dans le texte argumentatif ecrit chez les elèves de 8 à 12 ans et les adultes compétents

The objective of this research is to determine to what extend children from 8 to 12–13 years old become able to compose coherent counter-argumentative texts. 116 children and 26 quasi expert adults were asked to write a text beginning and ending with 2 imposed counterargumentative sentences. In that specific metalinguistic situation, pupils from 8 to 10 hesitate what text type (whether argumentative or not) to produce. When 10–11 years old, they seem aware the situation needs an argumentative response, but that does not necessary enable them to counter-argue. By children from 11–12 years old and adults, texts are most frequently counter-argumentative. It is proposed to explain this evolution by a progressive mastery of a possible argumentative prototypical text schema which could enable pupils to understand the 2 imposed sentences as knots to be expanded from a complexe argumentative text, and, in the same way, to compose this text. This explanative hypothesis is apparently sustained by the positive effects on the performances of 40 pupils from 8 to 12–13 years old of didactic interventions intended to make them sensible to argumentative text properties.     

Student Identities and/in Schooling: Subjection and adolescent performativity

This article uses a fictionalized scenario to examine how three students at an “ordinary” suburban high school in Canada negotiate the context-specific conditions, discourses, and practices that make schools important sites of identity formation. It argues that drawing from Foucault's ideas on the “subjection” of individuals, as well as from the field of performance studies, provides a fresh perspective to redress the potential mismatches between official multicultural education discourses and the lived schooling realities of students. In the process, it demonstrates how subjection and adolescent performativity can be useful analytics through which to understand student identities and/in schooling. The article concludes with some implications for shifts in policy, pedagogy, and practice to help schools engage with student diversity.