Engaging Undergraduate Kinesiology Students in Clinically-based Research

Many undergraduate students in kinesiology are interested in clinical careers and seek research opportunities for advanced study and unique learning experiences. This article describes a process of engaging undergraduate students in a multi-disciplinary, National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded program project investigating factors that may affect pelvic floor support and symptoms in primiparous women during the first year postpartum. Students complete general and protocol-specific training prior to engagement, have specific tasks that reinforce skill development and require independence, and are invited to participate in additional opportunities with the investigative team. The topic of pelvic floor health is novel to most students and participation in this research expands their knowledge beyond a mainstream kinesiology curriculum. Institutionalizing this type of program could formalize undergraduate student research experiences and facilitate ongoing clinical research efforts with a kinesiology focus.     

Post-secondary Science Students’ Explanations of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Randomness</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Variation</Emphasis> and Implications for Science Learning

The concepts of randomness and variation are pervasive in science. The purpose of this study was to document how post-secondary life science students explain randomness and variation, infer relationships between their explanations, and ability to describe and identify appropriate and inappropriate variation, and determine if students can identify sources of variation. An instrument designed to test statistical concepts was administered to 282 college students from three universities, ranging from introductory non-science majors to science graduate students. Students readily distinguished between causes of variation. A naïve no-pattern concept of randomness persisted from first-year non-science majors to senior-level science majors, contributing to incorrect responses on the variation instrument. Students’ expressions of randomness were better predictors of performance on the variation instrument than their expressions of variation. It is argued that inclusion of everyday language uses of randomness in instruction can bridge the gap between vernacular and scientific uses of this term.     

Map Perspective and the Learning of Text

In two studies, undergraduates learned a map of the city of Rome in either a flat survey map or a one-point perspective format. The perspective map lead to greater feature recall in the first study and to better memory for a related text when features were correctly located in the second study. Both studies suggest that map scanning patterns may differ depending on the learner′s point of view.     

Assessing activity–based learning for a networked course

Networked environments offer new scope for presenting activity based courses, in which activities and reflection form the central backbone of course pedagogy. Such courses promise an enriching approach to study, but there are also challenges for the design of assessment. This paper describes a qualitative study of student and tutor perspectives on the assessment of an innovative undergraduate course at the UK Open University which has employed an activity–based approach. It discusses the relationship between assessment, student participation, and the development of skills, and then outlines the priorities for the design of assessment for such courses.     

Professors' and students' conceptualizations of the learning task in introductory physics courses

What are students expected to learn in physics courses? Eight expert physics teachers and researchers, two from the University of Western Ontario in Canada, Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, Stanford University in the United States of America, and Monash University in Australia, described their perceptions of learning in their courses. Students from the courses were then interviewed for their perceptions of learning in physics courses. In their courses, professors focused on the development of intellectual skills, assuming that students had a specific physics vocabulary. Students, however, were aware of their own limitations and suggested that professors should take nothing for granted. Students considered that to be a good teacher, a professor should know the perspective of the students and should start at the students' level. The results suggested that the intellectual challenge of learning physics merits early explanation.     

The Emotionally Intelligent Early Childhood Educator: Self-Reflective Journaling

A current interest in education is the growing awareness that the development of social and emotional skills in children is critical for the foundation of academic knowledge in the classroom. The early childhood educator is in a position to be a powerful nurturer of the social emotional development in young children. It is important, therefore, to challenge early childhood teachers, particularly veteran teachers, to take a closer look at their own social and emotional skills and to systematically reassess these skills through an emotionally intelligent “lens”. The field of emotional intelligence is a new and exciting area of academic research that looks at emotional abilities within the following four domains: (1) perception skills; (2) accessing skills; (3) understanding skills; and (4) regulation skills. This article presents a userfriendly methodology to assess and enhance the emotional intelligence abilities of teachers, and thereby impact the abilities of the young children they teach.     

Children's temperament and behavior problems predict their employed mothers' work functioning

Numerous studies have been conducted on the impact of dual-earner parents' employment on their children, yet the reverse process-the impact of children and their behavior on the work functioning of their parents-has been ignored. This study investigated spillover from the mother role to the work role in a sample of more than 300 families. At 4 months, 12 months, 3.5 years, and 4.5 years of age, child's difficult temperament was significantly associated with mother's work outcomes, including work role quality and rewards from combining work and family. The evidence was consistent with a structural model in which maternal sense of parenting competence and maternal depressed affect mediated these effects.     

Formative Automated Computer Testing (FACT)

This study describes the context for the development of a tool to formatively assess information technology skills of students. The tool provides a reliable and valid assessment of word processing competency, utilizing automation to apply the test instrument via the Microsoft Office package. Tests can be designed directly by tutors, and delivered via a network. Evaluation of the tests suggests that immediate automated testing is preferred by students compared to a traditional written test. There is evidence that the tool improves the IT skills of its users, whereas a traditional written test has no such beneficial effect.     

Fostering Distributed Science Learning Through Collaborative Technologies

TACTICS (French and Spanish acronym standing for Collaborative Work and Learning in Science with Information and Communications Technologies) is an ongoing project aimed at investigating a distributed community of learning and practice in which information and communications technologies (ICT) take the role of collaborative tools to support social construction of knowledge. This community is composed of researchers, graduate students, and high-school teachers and their students, from six schools and four universities in Canada and Mexico. It set out in fall 2000 to develop a community around the general topic of integrating concepts in science school subjects. Once a prototype community is established, it can become a terrain where different aspects could be studied. Subsequently, researchers could gradually take a back seat allowing as well as ensuring the autonomy of the school members involved and, thereby, the viability of the learning community. The set up of the proposed prototype distributed science learning community was therefore an essential yet far from trivial first step. This paper discusses the process of setting up the community and the lessons learned.     

Educating students with FASD: linking policy,research and practice

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD ) is a prevalent neurodevelopmental disability with significant implications for learning and behaviour. International research suggests that the prevalence of FASD in school‐aged children is 2.3–6.3%. In this paper, we address the questions: (1) what is FASD ; (2) what is the prevalence of FASD in schools; (3) what is the impact of FASD ; and (4) why develop special FASD education strategies and programmes? We summarise the 18‐year history of W innipeg S chool D ivision's development of its FASD P rogramme of services, describe the specialised FASD classrooms and then present the results from a consensus‐generating workshop comprised of 36 FASD education professionals, with over 209 years of collective FASD education programme experience, who were asked to identify and reach consensus on best strategies and lessons learned in FASD education programmes. We then suggest that effectively educating children with FASD is critical to get right if positive educational outcomes are to be realised.