Rediscovering the Role of Interscholastic Sports

The goals of today's school athletic programs are vastly different from the original intentions of the administrators who established the first interscholastic athletic teams. For athletics to be anything more than a drain on school and taxpayer resources, these programs must undergo serious changes.     

Students' understandings about animal skeletons

Surprisingly few studies have looked at people's understanding of skeletons. Most of the work in this field that has been done has only involved children's understanding of human skeletons. This study looks at students' understandings of the structure of animal (including human) skeletons. A crosssectional approach was used involving a total of 175 students in England from six different age groups (ranging from 4 year olds to 20 year olds). Students were presented, on separate occasions, with specimens of a brown rat, a starling and a herring and asked to draw what they thought was inside each specimen. On a final occasion, they were also asked to draw what they thought was inside themselves. Repeated inspections of the completed drawings allowed us to construct a seven point scale of 'skeletal understanding'. Our analysis shows the extent to which student understanding increases with age and the degree to which pupils know more about human than other skeletons. The findings are interpreted with reference to current trends in English science curricula and pedagogy. We comment in particular on the current inability of most students to see the skeleton as a functional, integrated whole.     

DEVELOPING A CONFERENCE FOR THE ELDERLY AS PART OF A UNIVERSITY EDUCATIONAL GERONTOLOGY CLASS

The undergraduate course Educational Gerontology taught at Hampton University includes the development and implementation of a community conference for older adults. The conference is developed in conjunction with the local senior center. Students spend two hours each week throughout the semester observing and participating in the programming at the senior center in order to become familiar with the needs and interests of older adults. During scheduled class times, students select an appropriate conference theme and begin conference plans and committee assignments. The class culminates with the conducting of the conference at the center. Such a project gives students the opportunity to get valuable hands‐on experience in educational gerontology programming.     

The Centre for Studies in Science Education at the University of Leeds

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of aesthetic science activities on improving elementary school at-risk families’ children's positive thinking, attitudes toward science, and decreasing their anxiety about learning science. Thirty-six 4th-grade children from at-risk families volunteered to participate in a 12-week intervention and formed the experimental group; another 97 typical 4th graders were randomly selected to participant in the assessment and were used as the comparison group. The treatment for experimental group children emphasized scaffolding aesthetic science activities and inquiry strategies. The Elementary School Student Questionnaire was administered to assess all children's positive thinking, attitudes toward science, and anxiety about learning science. In addition, nine target children from the experimental group with the lowest scores on either positive thinking, or attitudes toward science, or with the highest scores on anxiety about learning science in the pre-test were recruited to be interviewed at the end of the intervention and observed weekly. Confirmatory factor analyses, analyses of covariance, and content theme analysis assessed the similarities and differences between groups. It was found that the at-risk families’ children were motivated by the treatment and made significant progress on positive thinking and attitudes toward science, and also decreased their anxiety about learning science. The findings from interviews and classroom observations also revealed that the intervention made differences in children's affective perceptions of learning science. Implication and research recommendation are discussed.     

Arms control for armed uninhabited vehicles: an ethical issue

Arming uninhabited vehicles (UVs) is an increasing trend. Widespread deployment can bring dangers for arms-control agreements and international humanitarian law (IHL). Armed UVs can destabilise the situation between potential opponents. Smaller systems can be used for terrorism. Using a systematic definition existing international regulation of armed UVs in the fields of arms control, export control and transparency measures is reviewed; these partly include armed UVs, but leave large gaps. For preventive arms control a general prohibition of armed UVs would be best. If that is unattainable, several measures should be taken. An explicit prohibition of autonomous attack, that is without a human decision, should be added to IHL. Concerning armed UVs remotely controlled by a human soldier, recommendations differ according to type or mission. New kinds of uninhabited nuclear-weapon carriers should be banned. Space weapons should be prohibited in general. UVs smaller than 0.2–0.5 m should be banned. Bigger remotely controlled armed UVs not equipped with weapons of mass destruction should be subject to numerical limitations in various categories. For these the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe is an important precedent.