Física para simples mortales

La comprensión de las relaciones y leyes físicas depende, como se analiza en este artículo, del modo en que se represente éstas el alumno. El predominio de sistemas matemáticos de explicación e intuición de las leyes físicas—la vía cuantitativa—parece producir una visión opaca de esas leyes y lleva a errores graves de comprensión, pese a la correcta, pero inestable aplicación puntual de fórmulas.

En este artículo se exponen nuevos métodos de enseñanza de la física por ordenador que presentan entornos interactivos cuasi-reales—micromundos—y que se basan en sistemas visuales—vía cualitativa—haciendo así transparentes los procesos físicos tradicionalmente ocultos tras el ropaje notacional de los operadores matemáticos.     

Effect of Guided Practice on Overhand-Throw Ball Velocities of Kindergarten Children

Abstract

Forty-five children from two intact kindergartens in one school were randomly assigned by sex to (a) an experimental group which received a movement program that included 120 min of guided practice in the overhand throw; or (b) a control group which received the same movement program but no exposure to the throw. A third group (N = 24), randomly selected by sex from a comparable school, received no movement program. Before and after the eight-week instructional period, ten trials of each child's overhand throw for force were filmed. Horizontal ball velocities were simultaneously recorded. ANOVAs on pre- and posttest ball velocities for each sex within each treatment group revealed no significant practice effect over ten trials (p > .05); thus, the trial mean was used as each subject's score. Two-way ANOVAs (treatment X sex) on the pre- and posttest data indicated no significant velocity differences (p > .05) between groups either before or after instruction. Boys had significantly greater velocities than girls (p < .05). Eight weeks of instruction that included 120 min of guided practice in the overarm throw did not significantly change the ball velocities of kindergarten children when compared to two groups with no formal throwing experience.     

The impact of education level and type on moral reasoning

The importance of education in developing morally sensitive individuals who use principled moral reasoning when facing dilemmas has been widely acknowledged. In the context of the criticism levelled at the Irish higher education system for failing to fulfil the role of intellectual leader and moral critic within the public domain, this paper examines the impact of education level (both undergraduate and post-graduate) and type (arts or technical/profession-based) on moral reasoning using 311 Irish participants from a wide variety of educational backgrounds. An enhanced understanding of the impact of education on moral reasoning will facilitate the development of educational initiatives aimed at augmenting moral reasoning in higher-level students.     

How PETE comes to matter in the performance of social justice education

ABSTRACT

Background: For over four decades, there have been calls for physical education (PE) and physical education teacher education (PETE) to address social inequality and foster social justice. Yet, as numerous studies demonstrate, attempts to educate for social justice in PETE are infrequent and rarely comprehensive. This raises the question why it appears to be possible in some situations but not others, and for some students and not others.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the multiple socio-political networks or assemblages in which PETE is embedded and explore how these shape the possibilities for students to engage with the concept of social justice and sociocultural issues (SCI) when learning to teach PE. Two research questions guided this study: How does an orientation for social justice education (SJE) within education policy affect the standards for enacting PETE programs? How is SJE encouraged within PETE programs?

Methodology: Drawing from a broader study of over 70 key personnel in more than 40 PETE programs, we examined how faculty in PETE understand their professional world, identify their subjective meanings of their experiences, and address SCI andSJE within PETE. Data sources included an initial survey, a semi-structured interview, and program artifacts. We analyze the ways that SJE/SCI was represented in three national settings (England, the United States, and New Zealand) and identified common themes.

Results: Examination of each national setting reveals ways that SJE and SCI were enabled and constrained across the national, programmatic, and individual level in each of the countries. The coherence of explicit National policy and curricula, PETE program philosophies, and the presence of multiple individual interests in social justice served to reify a sociocultural agenda. Conversely, possibilities were nullified by narrow or general National Standards, programs that failed to acknowledge sociocultural interests, and the absence of a critical mass of actors with a socio-critical orientation. These differences in assemblage culminated in variations in curriculum time that served to restrict or enable the breadth, frequency, and consistency of the messages surrounding SCI in PETE.

Conclusion: These findings highlight the importance of acknowledging socio-political networks where PETE operates. The agency of PETEs to enact pedagogies that foreground sociocultural interests is contingent on congruity of the networks. The authors caution that although the ‘perfect storm’ of conditions has a profound influence of the possibility of transformational learning of SCI in PETE, this arrangement is always temporary, fluid, and subject to changes in any of the three network levels. Additionally, the success of PETE in enabling graduating PE teachers to recognize the inequities that may be reinforced through the ‘hidden curriculum’ and to problematize the subject area is contingent on the expectations of the schools in which they teach.     

One of the gang? Peer relations among students with special educational needs in Irish mainstream primary schools

Internationally and in Ireland, the adoption of inclusive education frameworks have been broadly welcomed, particularly by parents of children with special educational needs (SEN). Mainstreaming these children is generally viewed as positive primarily because of the social factors associated with attending mainstream schools for children with SEN. Despite this commonly held view, there is increasing evidence to show that children with SEN have difficulties participating in mainstream environments. Using data from the Growing Up in Ireland study of 8,578 nine year olds, this paper examines whether peer relations differ among typically developing students and students with different types of SEN. We focus on the quantity and quality of peer relations using data on the child’s number of friends and, using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, the quality of relations with their peers. These measures are examined by controlling for a range of individual, home and school-level factors simultaneously in a regression model. Our findings show that, all else being equal, students with SEN, particularly those with emotional and behavioural difficulties (EBD), are more likely to have fewer friends and experience negative peer relationships compared to their peers without any additional needs. Based on these findings, we argue that specific interventions may be needed to promote positive peer experiences for children with SEN in mainstream education.     

Noun or verb? Adult readers’ sensitivity to spelling cues to grammatical category in word endings

The spelling of many disyllabic English word endings holds cues to their grammatical category, beyond obvious inflectional endings such as -ing for verbs. For example, some letter sequences are clearly associated with nouns (e.g., -oon) and others with verbs (e.g., -erge). This study extended recent research by Arciuli and Cupples (2006), and confirmed that skilled adult readers are sensitive to these orthographic cues. It was found that adults were more likely to treat pseudowords as nouns when they had noun-like endings than verb-like or control endings, and more likely to treat pseudowords as verbs when they had verb-like than noun-like endings. This sensitivity held across three tasks (sentence construction, sentence judgement, and pseudoword judgement), which required increasingly explicit awareness of the way that cues could allow grammatical categorisation. In some tasks sensitivity to verb-like endings was related to reading ability, although not to spelling ability or grammatical awareness. Implications for our understanding of language processing are discussed.     

Knowing in action: Beyond communities of practice

This paper engages with the recent turn in the social sciences towards communities of practice as a driver of learning and knowledge generation across a variety of different working environments. While agreeing with the broad reinstatement of situated social practice in thinking on the dynamics of knowledge capitalism, the paper takes issue with the increasingly homogeneous and instrumentalist use of the term communities of practice to encapsulate ‘knowing in action’. On the basis of an extensive review of the available literature, the paper argues for the importance of differentiating between different varieties of knowing in action. The paper notes the differences - in organisation, spatial dynamics, innovation outcomes, and knowledge processes - between four modes: craft or task-based knowing; epistemic or high creativity knowing; professional knowing; and virtual knowing. The proposed typology is used to illustrate the insight gained from such analytical precision, through a discussion of the spatial configuration of knowing in action, long assumed to require spatial proximity. It is shown that spatial and relational proximity - which can be struck at a distance - should not be treated as one and the same.