A season-long team-building intervention: examining the effect of team goal setting on cohesion

The purpose of the current study was to determine whether the implementation of a season-long team-building intervention program using team goal setting increased perceptions of cohesion. The participants were 86 female high school basketball players from 8 teams. The teams were randomly assigned to either an experimental team goal-setting or control condition. Each participant completed the Group Environment Questionnaire (GEQ; Carron, Brawley, & Widmeyer, 2002; Carron, Widmeyer, & Brawley, 1985), which assessed cohesion at both the beginning and end of the season. Overall, the results revealed a significant multivariate effect, Pillai's trace F(12, 438) = 2.68, p = .002. Post hoc analyses showed that at the beginning of the season, athletes from both conditions did not differ in their perceptions of cohesion. However, at the end of the season, athletes in the team goal-setting condition held higher perceptions of cohesion than athletes in the control condition. Overall, the results indicated that team goal setting was an effective team-building tool for influencing cohesiveness in sport teams.     

Verbal energy: attending to poetry

This paper contends that the current English curriculum does not adequately acknowledge the potential of poetry to make meaning through sound. It reflects on how sound may embody or communicate meaning, and seeks enhanced conceptions of this aspect of poetry for pedagogy and the curriculum. It begins with the attention the mainstream press gave to Seamus Heaney's remarks about Eminem, and progresses to consider Heaney's notion of ‘verbal energy’ in the light of developing conceptions of multimodal ‘new literacies’. It suggests that new approaches could accord with an oral heritage approach to poetry while also acknowledging the influence of the communicational environments pupils experience beyond English classrooms. Throughout, the author draws on material that has informed his on‐going Teacher Training Agency‐sponsored project exploring the ways in which pupils approach poetry as sound, soon to be detailed on web resources for the English teaching community.     

Technical Education,the Performance of South Wales Industrialists and the Haldane Commission

The article begins with a brief introduction to the development of Welsh society and industry between 1870 and 1914. This is followed by a review of Welsh education, especially technical education, in that period, highlighting its backwardness and the factors accounting for that backwardness. The report of the Haldane Commission is then examined against a background of a brief statement of the ‘revisionist’ case. Against the British Retardation theory, the performance of south Wales' industrialists is assessed. This reveals that in contradiction to the ‘revisionist’ view that British industrialists did as well as could have been expected, such was not the case in south Wales.