Varsity athletes have lower 2D:4D ratios than other university students

The second to fourth digit ratio (2D:4D) is a sexually dimorphic trait with lower finger ratios considered more masculine. These digit ratios are believed to reflect the prenatal hormonal environment with higher exposure to androgens in utero leading to more masculine digit ratios. The 2D:4D ratio has been negatively correlated with many factors, including aggression, physical fitness, and athleticism. We compared 2D:4D finger ratios of (1) male and female varsity athletes (n = 99) versus male and female student non-athletes (n = 122), and (2) males (n = 104) versus females (n = 117). Our results confirmed that both male (mean ± s(x) : 0.97 ± 0.004) and female (0.98 ± 0.005) varsity athletes had significantly lower ratios than their non-varsity peers (males: 0.99 ± 0.004; females: 1.00 ± 0.006), and that male athletes had significantly lower 2D:4D ratios than female athletes. Overall, males had significantly lower 2D:4D ratios than females (0.98 ± 0.003 vs. 0.99 ± 0.004). A smaller 2D:4D ratio appears to be consistent with participation in varsity sports among both males and females.     

New Visuality in Art/Science: A Pedagogy of Connection for Cognitive Growth and Creativity

New visuality in art/science pedagogies challenges teachers to rethink their curriculum and the role of digital new media in facilitating conceptual thinking and the role of the creative representation of knowledge. Recent neuroscientific research on cognition, perception, memory, and emotion inform and provoke implications for 21st-century learning. Analysis of student artwork uncovers pedagogical challenges for teachers. Teachers use visual learning and its forms of higher process thinking to allow students to make cognitive connections with images, giving them the capacity to integrate concepts for the communication of art/science learning. Examples of student learning from years 3–5 and 15–17 illustrate these ideas.     

Navigating Uncertainty: Early Career Academics and Practices of Appraisal Devices

Minerva - There is a lack of objective evaluative standards for academic work. While this has been recognized in studies of how gatekeepers pass judgment on the works of others, little is known...     

Ethos of Ambiguity: Artist Teachers and the Transparency Exclusion Paradox

Addressing changes in conditions for practitioners that can be related to education policy in England and Wales since 2010, this article presents issues faced by teachers of art and design and their responses in practice. The current insistence on transparency in education emerges through policy that audits performativity, in a limiting skills bank. Practitioners in art and design are particularly affected by what I term ‘the transparency‐exclusion paradox’, as they battle to maintain the subject area and are ‘othered’ by the English Baccalaureate and Progress 8. I will discuss an emergent ‘ethos of ambiguity’ among artist‐teachers and contemporary artists, with a theoretical basis informed by Beauvoir and Foucault. Empirical data from research participants will be evidenced, to explore strategies of response in inclusive social practice. This article adds to literature that considers the effects of policy in implementation and it contributes to research on creative expressions of ambiguity in the arts.     

The state of evidence for social and emotional learning: A contemporary meta-analysis of universal school-based SEL interventions

This article provides a systematic review and meta-analysis of the current evidence for universal school-based (USB) social and emotional learning (SEL) interventions for students in kindergarten through 12th grade available from 2008 through 2020. The sample includes 424 studies from 53 countries, reflecting 252 discrete USB SEL interventions, involving 575,361 students. Results endorsed that, compared to control conditions, students who participate in USB SEL interventions experienced significantly improved skills, attitudes, behaviors, school climate and safety, peer relationships, school functioning, and academic achievement. Significant heterogeneity in USB SEL content, intervention features, context, and implementation quality moderated student experiences and outcomes. Strengths and limitations of this evidence and implications for future USB SEL research, policy, and practice are discussed.     

Articulation and Transfer for Career and Technical Students: Best Practices for Dealing with Real and Perceived Barriers to Baccalaureate Degree Attainment for Applied Science Students

ABSTRACT

Community colleges produce large numbers of high quality graduates from career and technical programs. These programs are often of high academic rigor and quality. However, most universities view these Applied Associates of Science (AAS) as being terminal associate's degrees that are not appropriate for transfer. Regional accrediting standards are often cited as the reason for this differentiation. The reality is that institutional policies often simply dismiss AAS courses by their prefix to simplify the process. This study and presentation will explore the reality of what is allowed by accrediting bodies in transferring AAS courses and best practices for facilitating the maximum allowable course transfer.     

Unsettling the ‘Challenge’: ELT Policy Ideology and the New Breach Amongst State-funded Schools in Colombia

ABSTRACT

This article examines the ideologies present in Colombian official policy for English language teaching (ELT) and traces the links between governmental planning for state-funded schools and school pedagogical practices. Building on analysis of interviews with policy agents, policymakers’ pronouncements, documents and classroom observations, the article contends that instead of working towards educational equity, official policy actions are creating a new breach amongst state-funded schools, that is, between schools that are ‘focalised’ and others that are not. The national high-stakes exam for school leavers and the strategy of presenting policy goals and outcomes as a constant challenge perpetuate the knowledge-based economy ideology in the policy documents and pose a limit to teachers’ and schools’ decisions. The paper concludes with a call for a clear analysis of the material contexts of the ELT policy by policy actors at the macro-level and teacher agency that leads to student language learning despite policy constraints.     

Ethnic Identity Development and Acculturation Preferences Among Minority and Majority Youth: Norms and Contact

This article tests a longitudinal model of the antecedents and consequences of changes in identification with indigenous (Mapuche) among indigenous and nonindigenous youth in Chilean school contexts over a 6‐month period (633 nonindigenous and 270 Mapuche students, M_ages = 12.47 and 12.80 years, respectively). Results revealed that in‐group norms supporting contact and quality of intergroup contact at Time 1 predicted student's changes in Mapuche identification at Time 2, which in turn predicted changes in support for adoption of Chilean culture and maintenance of Mapuche culture at Time 2; some of the relationships between these variables were found to be moderated by age and ethnicity. Conceptual and policy implications are addressed in the Discussion .     

Ways of Talking (and Acting) About Language Reclamation: An Ethnographic Perspective on Learning Lenape in Pennsylvania

The experiences of a community of people learning and teaching Lenape in Pennsylvania provide insights into the complexities of current ways of talking and acting about language reclamation. We illustrate how Native and non-Native participants in a university-based Indigenous language class constructed language, identity, and place in nuanced ways that, although influenced by essentializing discourses of language endangerment, are largely pluralist and reflexive. Rather than counting and conserving fixed languages, the actors in this study focus on locally appropriate language education, undertaken with participatory classroom discourses and practices. We argue that locally responsible, participatory educational responses to language endangerment such as this, although still rare in formal higher education, offer a promising direction in which to invest resources.     

Introduction to the Treatment of Non-Linear Effects Using a Gravitational Pendulum

We show that the treatment of pendulum movement, other than the linear approximation,may be an instructive experimentally based introduction to the physics of non-lineareffects. Firstly the natural frequency of a gravitational pendulum is measured as functionof its amplitude. Secondly forced oscillations of a gravitational pendulum are investigatedexperimentally without limiting amplitudes. By this arrangement new phenomena, thebistability and the jump-effect, can be observed. In the case of bistability the drivengravitational pendulum can oscillate in two different stable modes. Either it oscillateswith a small amplitude and approximately in phase with the exciting torque or it oscillateswith a larger amplitude and approximately anti-phase. The jump effect is the spontaneoustransition from one mode of oscillation to the other. Both effects can be demonstrated andexplained.