What do set facilitators bring to the party? (And do we need them?)

This account of practice discusses the learning of a set that met for five years as part of undertaking a research degree. It focuses on questions relating to the role of the facilitator that emerge from the experience of an action learning set that was first helped by an external facilitator and that, after 18 months, became self-facilitating. Key to our success as a set was the openness to the emergent learning about the process; each difficulty we faced (as a set and individually) was taken as an opportunity for deepening our learning about set dynamics and facilitation. This article shares some of the highs and lows of our journey, illustrating how we learned to be an effective set that became self-facilitating.     

Attentional and executive function behaviours in children with poor working memory

The purpose of this study was to explore the profiles of classroom behaviour relating to attention and executive functions in children with very poor working memory, and to test the hypothesis that inattentive behaviour and working memory problems co-occur. Teachers rated problem behaviours of 52 children with low working memory scores aged 5/6 and 9/10 years on teacher rating measures of attention and executive function behaviours. The majority of children with low working memory scores obtained atypically high ratings of cognitive problems/ inattentive symptoms, and were judged to have short attention spans, high levels of distractibility, problems in monitoring the quality of their work, and difficulties in generating new solutions to problems. These results extend previous findings that working memory problems and inattentive behaviour co-occur to a non-clinical sample. It is suggested that reduced working memory capacity may play a causal role in the problem behaviours of these children.     

Core competence and education

Core competence is a managerial concept used toanalyse and develop key elements of business strategy. This article outlines the concept and applies it topost-compulsory education in the UK. Afterconsidering educational characteristics which might beconsidered to delineate core competence, an economicapproach is adopted. The educational perspectivesuggests accreditation as the core competence ofUniversities. The economic approach suggests that themarket trend toward lifetime learning might best bemet by institutions developing a core competence inrelationship marketing. The article concludes byconsidering the implications for the institutionalstructure of post-compulsory education.     

Pre-shot EEG alpha-power reactivity during expert air-pistol shooting: a comparison of best and worst shots

The aim of this study was to examine the proposal that pre-shot occipital electroencephalogram (EEG) alpha-power reactivity would not only associate with, but also have a causal role in, the relative success of performance outcome in expert air-pistol shooting. Six expert air-pistol shooters performed a sixty-shot match, individually, while electroencephalograms were captured from occipital and anterior-temporal electrode sites during the aiming period (3 x 2 s epochs) before shot release. The five best shots and five worst shots were selected for each shooter on the basis of four shot quality indicators, and pre-shot EEG alpha power for best shots was compared with that of worst shots. Occipital EEG alpha power was found to increase during epochs 1-3 before best shots, but to decrease before worst shots; it was significantly greater during the final pre-shot epoch of best shots. This finding suggests that visual attention to the pistol and target was gradually suppressed during the pre-shot period of best shots, whereas it gradually increased before worst shots. In addition, significantly greater EEG alpha power was found at the left than at the right anterior-temporal site, lending support to the robust findings of previous target-sport studies. We conclude that the participants were able to shoot at the target with greatest success when not having maximal visual attention on where the pistol was aimed and that suppression of visual attention during the final seconds of the pre-shot period is a necessary prerequisite for automatic shot execution, as controlled by mechanisms of intention.     

Adult spelling strategies

The goal of this study was to investigate how adult English speakers, who are good readers, but who differ in spelling ability, remember word-specific spelling information. In the first experiment, participants learned the spellings of words they had previously misspelled, while thinking out loud. The main strategies observed in order of popularity were: letter rehearsal, overpronunciation, comparison of the remembered and the correct spelling, morphological analysis and visualisation. All strategies produced good learning success for the better spellers, but weaker spellers had less success with overpronunciation, comparison and morphological analysis. In a second experiment, when participants were shown their misspelling and the correct spelling, and instructed to use either overpronunciation or comparison to learn the correct spelling, learning success was independent of spelling ability. However, sequential verbal memory ability was associated with greater success in using overpronunciation, and sequential visual memory ability with greater success in using comparison. The findings provide new insight into the types of strategies that advanced learners use spontaneously to memorise arbitrary letter sequences, as well as revealing how effective the strategies are.     

The effect of relative age on achievement in middle school

To determine the relationship between relative age and achievement in middle school, standardized math and reading scores for a sample of middle-class, suburban middle school students (N = 933) were examined. Analysis of variance revealed a significant difference among relative age groups in only one area, sixth-grade reading, F(2, 146) = 3.1, p < .05. There was no main effect for gender and no interaction between age and gender in sixth, seventh, or eighth grade. When the birth month of students who had repeated one or more grades was examined, it was revealed that a large percentage of these students would have been the youngest in the class when beginning school. Results suggest that a relationship between relative age and achievement may exist in the lower grades but diminishes or disappears by seventh or eighth grade because of the retention of a larger proportion of the youngest children.