Research engagement and educational decentralisation: problematising primary school English teachers’ research experiences in China

Teachers are encouraged to enhance professional competence through reflective practice and they are also asked to undertake research to generate evidence for their professional practices. This paper reports on an inquiry into a group of primary school English language teachers’ research engagement in the province of Guangdong on the Chinese mainland. The inquiry explored the effect of educational reforms on the participants’ research engagement through the use of an open‐ended questionnaire and group interviews. The inquiry revealed that research engagement had become an important part of the teachers’ professional lives. Emerging findings from the inquiry also problematised their research engagement as it was found to have been undermined by a competitive promotion mechanism, the teachers’ conceptualisations of research and challenges in the knowledge dissemination process. The paper ends with reflections on how to make teacher research “educational” for teachers and serve as an effective way for professional development.     

Corresponding drivability control and energy control strategy in uninterrupted multi-speed mining trucks

An hybrid uninterrupted multi-speed transmission (HUMST), based on the integration of a planetary gear set and a 3-speed automatic manual transmission (3-AMT), is developed to satisfy the specific performance indexes of mining trucks. The power-split device can alleviate and eliminate the inherent torque interruption of the 3-AMT during gear shift by implementing the designed cooperative shift control strategy which is optimized by quadratic performance index. In order to achieve fast torque coordination while guaranteeing the driving comfort performance, the torque profiles of the power split device and the traction motor are optimized by Linear-quadratic regulator (LQR) algorithm. Dynamic programming (DP) is implemented as a benchmark to demonstrate the maximum fuel efficiency of the proposed HUMST. Because of the high computational cost of optimal control strategies such as DP, an improved real-time control strategy (IRTCS) using modified Gaussian distribution function is proposed to significantly reduce the computing load. As efficiency-oriented energy control strategy would result in frequent gear shifts, to achieve a desirable tradeoff between the overall efficiency and the shift stability, multi-objective genetic algorithm (MGA) is integrated to optimize the overall performance. The detail mathematical and dynamic model shows that the proposed shifting strategy with LQR can effectively suppress shift jerk, and the proposed IRTCS with MGA can reduce shift frequency by 70.78% to improve the drivability, only sacrificing 4.86% of overall efficiency compared to that of DP.     

Nutrition guidelines for strength sports: sprinting, weightlifting, throwing events, and bodybuilding

Strength and power athletes are primarily interested in enhancing power relative to body weight and thus almost all undertake some form of resistance training. While athletes may periodically attempt to promote skeletal muscle hypertrophy, key nutritional issues are broader than those pertinent to hypertrophy and include an appreciation of the sports supplement industry, the strategic timing of nutrient intake to maximize fuelling and recovery objectives, plus achievement of pre-competition body mass requirements. Total energy and macronutrient intakes of strength-power athletes are generally high but intakes tend to be unremarkable when expressed relative to body mass. Greater insight into optimization of dietary intake to achieve nutrition-related goals would be achieved from assessment of nutrient distribution over the day, especially intake before, during, and after exercise. This information is not readily available on strength-power athletes and research is warranted. There is a general void of scientific investigation relating specifically to this unique group of athletes. Until this is resolved, sports nutrition recommendations for strength-power athletes should be directed at the individual athlete, focusing on their specific nutrition-related goals, with an emphasis on the nutritional support of training.     

Understanding Bereavement in a Christian University: A Qualitative Exploration

This phenomenological study, based on ecological systems theory, examined the college student bereavement experience in a Christian university. Undergraduate students (N = 127) from a small Christian university provided answers to open‐ended questions about their experiences regarding college following a death loss. Results indicate that students are generally successful in adapting to bereavement and prefer an environment open to discussing death and asking difficult religious questions. Implications for counselors are provided.     

Academic social bookmarking: An empirical analysis of Connotea users

Three groups of social bookmarking users, namely experienced users, users with moderate level of experience, and novice users, were investigated, in terms of their reported tagging behaviors, perceived usefulness of social bookmarking in information discovery and management, and perceived usefulness of the bookmarking features provided. Based on the empirical analysis of the Connotea users, who are primarily in academia, the study shows that experienced academic users generally prefer to use social bookmarking while moderately experienced and novice users still prefer to use the traditional bookmarking methods, such as creating and using bookmarks on a dedicated computer. Experienced academic users were also found to create more tags per bookmark comparing to the other two groups. Most novice academic users, however, only created one tag per bookmark, which just met Connotea's minimum requirement. Surprisingly different from the collaborative design nature of the social bookmarking systems, the study finds that our participants, particularly experienced academic users, prefer to create and use their own bookmarks rather than sharing bookmarks created by others. In fact, experienced users have significantly higher frequency (once every two weeks) of creating bookmarks than the other two groups (once a month or less). In addition, website design features and functions, such as automatic collection of bibliographic information, are regarded by all participants as helpful for information discovery. The in-depth examination and discussion of the opinions of Connotea users may be useful for further improvement of the design features and usage applications, particularly for academic social bookmarking websites. The results may also have potential implications to the future development of social bookmarking services in general.     

Chronic neglect of family violence: more than a decade of reports to guide US policy

For more than a decade, several boards and committees have reviewed the state of policy, research, and services on child maltreatment and other forms of family violence in the US. Although these efforts have resulted in a redefinition of the tasks involved in protecting people within their homes, this new conceptualization has yet to have a substantial effect on policy, research, and services. Some positive steps have been taken, but most are still modest in scope. They may be dwarfed by the growing challenges in family and community life.     

Going Dutch: The Development of Collaborative Practices Between Higher Education and Museums and Galleries

This study reports on a very successful collaboration between teacher education courses in Manchester and Amsterdam and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The central aim of the initiative was to promote and sustain partnerships between Higher Education (HE) institutions, public galleries and schools with a view to developing, delivering and sharing good practice in art and design within a European context.     

The Funding of Higher Education in the UK: a Contribution to the Debate

In this paper we review arguments that have been well rehearsed in the economic literature in the past twenty years and which are relevant to the present debate over student loans and the funding of the higher education sector.
The body of the paper assesses four finding proposals: (1) The Government's mortgage-type loan scheme, (2) The Barr, National Insurance repayment scheme, (3) The Graduate Tax and (4) A Loan scheme based on the individual higher education institution.
Each proposal is assessed in terms of its efficiency impact in six dimensions, (i) set up costs and flexibility, (ii) administrative costs (iii) incentives (iv) information (v) the balance of public and private involvement, and (vi) equity.
We conclude that, overall, we would not recommend any of the alternatives as unambiguously superior on all counts. Insofar as a radical approach is to be implemented we argue that a scheme based on the individual higher education institution, with repayment via the National Insurance system, is probably the best option.