Undergraduate Social Work Students’ Perceptions of a Team-Based Learning Approach to Exploring Adult Development

ABSTRACT

Social work educators are challenged to adopt innovative instructional methods and pedagogies to prepare students to meet the contemporary needs of diverse client populations. A team-based learning (TBL) approach is a pedagogical strategy that utilizes cooperative and collaborative learning principles to inspire academic, professional, and interpersonal growth for students. This study explores perspectives of 93 undergraduate social work students regarding the benefits and challenges of using a TBL approach to research adult development. Despite identifying several benefits of this method, including in-depth learning and enhanced relationships, students also experienced significant challenges to working in teams.     

An ‘at‐risk’ curriculum for ‘at‐risk’ students? Special educational needs and disability in the new Australian Curriculum

The number of students who are ‘at risk’ including those with special education needs and or disabilities is increasing rapidly worldwide in all schools. This has prompted widespread debate regarding the impact of initiatives in Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting for this group of students. Teachers, parents and administrators need to have further information to enable them to contribute to the development of content, assessment and reporting processes in the curriculum that are inclusive, relevant, reliable and valid. This paper explores some of the issues and dilemmas raised by recent policy discussions regarding the inception of a first national Australian Curriculum. It draws purposively on literature relating to developments in England and Wales, where national curriculum provision has existed for over 25 years, as well as the responses of a group of stakeholders (teachers and leaders) from both England/Wales and Australian schools and settings. These data highlight both tension and opportunity in this area of work.     

An investigation of the five-factor model of personality and coping behaviour in sport

Abstract

Coping strategies are important for performance in sport and individual differences may contribute to the coping strategies adopted by athletes. In this study, we explored the main and interactive effects of the big five personality dimensions on sport-related coping and compared personality profiles of discrete groups of athletes. Altogether, 253 athletes (mean age 21.1 years, s = 3.7) completed the NEO-FFI (Costa & McCrae, 1992 Costa, P. T. and McCrae, R. R. 1992. Revised NEO personality inventory and NEO five-factor inventory: Professional manual, Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.  [Google Scholar]), and the Coping Function Questionnaire for Sport (Kowalski & Crocker, 2001 Kowalski, K. C. and Crocker, P. R. E. 2001. Development and validation of the Coping Function Questionnaire for adolescents in sport. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 23: 136–155. [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Results showed that extraverted athletes, who were also emotionally stable and open to new experiences (a three-way interaction effect), reported a greater use of problem-focused coping strategies. Conscientious athletes (main effect), and athletes displaying high levels of extraversion, openness, and agreeableness (a three-way interaction effect), reported a greater use of emotion-focused coping strategies, and athletes with low levels of openness, or high levels of neuroticism (main effects), reported a greater use of avoidance coping strategies. Different personality characteristics were observed between higher-level and lower-level athletes, between men and women athletes, and between individual and team sport athletes. These findings suggest that the five-factor model of personality can help distinguish various levels of athletic involvement and can help identify the coping strategies athletes are likely to adopt during participation.     

Dynamic behaviour of soils used for natural turf sports surfaces

The modulus and damping properties of soils in compression are a function of soil type, water content, stress history and loading rate. To model human–surface interaction with natural turf sports surfaces, stiffness and damping properties must be determined at dynamic loading rates. Two contrasting soil types, a Sand and a Clay Loam, commonly used in sports surfaces were loaded uniaxially to 2 kN at loading rates between 0.6 and 6 kN s⁻¹ in modified dynamic soil testing apparatus. Soils were compacted prior to loading but initial cycles resulted in viscoplastic deformation, with strain accumulation with repeated cycles of loading. Ultimately a resilient, viscoelastic steady-state equilibrium with loading was established. Resilient modulus and damping ratio varied with soil type, water content, stress history and increased significantly with loading rate. The resilient modulus of the Sand soil, typical of modern free-draining sand construction natural turf sports surfaces, was significantly greater than that of a Clay Loam soil more characteristic of traditional natural turf surfaces; reducing water content caused an increase in modulus and a decrease in damping ratio in the Clay Loam soil. Determination of these properties provides initial data for the modelling natural turf surface behaviour in terms of both ball and human interactions, with further research required to determine the effect of both grass roots and leaves on mechanical behaviour.     

Difficulties in Learning and Teaching Programming—Views of Students and Tutors

We have conducted a web-based questionnaire on the various concepts and topics of object-oriented programming that students on introductory courses found most difficult to cope with.A statistical analysis of our results shows that those topics that rely on a clear understanding of pointers and memory-related concepts (such as copy constructors and virtual functions) prove to be the most difficult. In other words, we believe these concepts are only hard because of the student's inability to comprehend what is happening to their program in memory, as they are incapable of creating a clear mental model of its execution.These results would suggest that a clearer approach to teaching these topics would be beneficial to students. We are currently working on a visualization-based approach to address these issues.