Psychosocial factors impacting STEM career selection

Attention on P-20 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education has increased tremendously in recent years. Many efforts are underway to promote STEM major and career selection across the nation; specifically, in engineering and computer science. The authors' purpose was to examine an underlying profile combinations of latent traits that influence student STEM career selection while designing serious educational games (SEGs). The authors combine a number of quantitative analysis methods in an effort to develop a rich understanding of how a profile combination of traits interact with one another to effect selection of STEM careers and majors. Study participants were 585 students enrolled in a full-time traditional high school. The addition of SEG design experiences into the student profile increases the probability of STEM career selection by 5.1 times.     

Reports of parental maltreatment during childhood in a United States population-based survey of homosexual,bisexual, and heterosexual adults

OBJECTIVE: The study objective was to determine the nature and prevalence of childhood maltreatment experiences among lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults and to compare findings to those obtained from similar heterosexual adults. METHOD: Data from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS), which measured both childhood experiences with parental emotional and physical maltreatment and adult sexual orientation, were used to compare childhood maltreatment experiences of 2,917 heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual individuals, age 25-74 years, separately by gender. RESULTS: Homosexual/bisexual men reported higher rates than heterosexual men of childhood emotional and any physical maltreatment (including major physical maltreatment) by their mother/maternal guardian and major physical maltreatment by their father/paternal guardian. In contrast, homosexual/bisexual women, as compared to heterosexual women, reported higher rates of major physical maltreatment by both their mother/maternal guardian and their father/ paternal guardian. Differences among individuals with differing sexual orientations were most pronounced for the more extreme forms of physical maltreatment. CONCLUSIONS: Adult minority sexual orientation is a risk indicator for positive histories of experiencing parental maltreatment during childhood. While the reasons for this are beyond the scope of the current study, previous research suggests that childhood individual differences, including possibly gender atypicality, may be a causal factor.     

Corruption in the 1960s?: Rethinking the Origins of Unethical Olympic Bidding Tactics

Most scholarship about improprieties surrounding Olympic host city selections starts with the Salt Lake City scandal, which television reporters broke in 1998, after which more details emerged revealing similar actions by previous Olympic hosts (as well as unsuccessful bid committees). Yet, the actions of these post-Los Angeles bid committees were not new, with local newspapers from the cities bidding for Games in the 1960s regularly reporting on significant amounts of money bid committees spent in the hope of winning the Games. The actions of the candidate cities for the 1968 Olympic Games went to great lengths to secure the Games. IOC efforts to impose regulations in response to these actions failed to yield significant changes on candidate cities. These examples from the 1960s demonstrate that the bribery of Nagano, Sydney, and Salt Lake City did not start from nowhere. Instead, the IOC long had a culture of improprieties when it came to selecting Olympic host cities – albeit on a smaller scale.     

Modifying the System for Observing Fitness Instruction Time to Measure Teacher Practices Related to Physical Activity Promotion: SOFIT+

The System for Observing Fitness Instruction Time (SOFIT) is commonly used to measure variables related to physical activity during physical education (PE). However, SOFIT does not yield detailed information about teacher practices related to children’s moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA). This study describes the modification of SOFIT (referred to as SOFIT+) to measure teacher practices related to students’ MVPA during PE lessons. Teacher practices that (a) promote and (b) limit children’s MVPA were identified and operationally defined via a literature review and Delphi Method. Reliability and validity data for SOFIT+ were obtained from 20 video recorded elementary PE lessons. Validity of teacher behaviors included in SOFIT+ was established using students’ accelerometer-derived MVPA. Twenty-seven teacher practices were identified. Inter-rater agreement ranged from 75.8% to 99.1% across 724 reliability scans. Six and seven practices were independently related to girls’ and boys’ MVPA, respectively. For example, during elimination activities, boys and girls were less likely to engage in MVPA. Boys were up to 1.51 times more likely to engage in MVPA while girls were up to 2.86 times more likely to engage in MVPA when a greater number of teacher practices were observed concurrently. Findings provide preliminary reliability and validity for SOFIT+, an instrument to comprehensively measure teacher practices related to children’s MVPA during PE.     

Ethnic identity over national identity: an alternative approach to measure the effect of the World Cup on social cohesion

The purpose of this study was to examine whether a mega sport event has the potential to bring the nation together by increasing the importance of national identity and decreasing the importance of ethnic identity on the outcome of social cohesion. Instead of replicating prior work that has performed mean score comparisons of national identity, ethnic identity, and social cohesion before and after a particular event, the authors compared the variance explained (pre vs. post event) to show the aggregate influence of the two identities on social cohesion. By focusing on this reporting method, the subsequent discussion rests entirely on the practical influence of the perceptual changes that resulted from event hosting. Data for this trend analysis were collected from South African residents, pre (N?=?1749), and post (N?=?2020) the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Results indicated that while the importance of national identity on social cohesion did not increase, the importance of ethnic identity did decrease strongly, indicating that these mega sports events might cause individuals to forget about their ethnic differences as a result of these events.     

Librarian as Professional

What does it mean to be a professional, and do librarians meet the academic definition of a professional? Professions are strongly related to identity, and stereotypes associated with the culture of a profession are going to have some effect on the public’s perceptions of that profession. The stereotype of the vaguely purposed but somehow controlling older person (who “shushes” patrons to maintain silence) does not contribute positively to the professional image of a librarian. Library users do not even superficially understand what librarians do, and this leads to an undervaluing of the impact and importance of librarians. In the modern environment of budget challenges, it is important to be able to articulate the value of both libraries and particularly librarians. This article explores the sociological academic literature on professions to determine if librarianship meets the requirements to be a profession, if library literature supports librarianship as a profession, and why it matters for librarians to be seen as professionals.     

An Analysis of Identifier Use in SHARE

SHARE, an open metadata aggregator for scholarly content launched in 2013, provides access to dispersed scholarly content through a powerful application programming interface and set of tools for research discovery and analytics. Metadata is crucial for retrieval in systems like SHARE. The use of unique identifiers promotes the disambiguation of people, places, and objects and the linking of related information in aggregated systems. Yet, identifiers have not been uniformly adopted by organizations and institutions worldwide. This column seeks to identify and explore the extent of identifier use in the SHARE catalog.     

Taking stock of environmental education policy in England – the what,the where and the why

Abstract

Taking England as our case study, this paper reviews secondary school environmental education from a policy perspective. By drawing on Stevenson’s typologies for environmental improvement and Lucas’ categorisation of environmental education, we analyse national policy documents, local authority and Multi-Academy Trust policies; and individual school planning documents. Our findings suggest in these areas a general absence of environment education policy, and where identified a rhetoric towards conservative reform framed as technology solutions, where learning is about the environment, rather than for the environment. We explain how the (lack of) environmental education rhetoric is a result of global economic changes and national austerity policies, and offer insights and signposting for policy makers.