Institutional perspectives on the implementation of disability legislation and services for Spectators with Disabilities in European professional football

Contemporary national and international football governing bodies and professional football clubs are expected to comply with stadium accessibility laws and regulations. They are also required to demonstrate that they are responsible to all their customers, including those who experience impairment and/or disability as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policies. One strategy to address stadium accessibility and wider-equity issues for spectators with disabilities (SwD) and their companions, is through appointing the ‘incipient managerial position’ of the Disability Liaison Officer (DLO). This exploratory paper is motivated by a paucity of studies examining impairment and/or disability within sport management. Drawing on institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983, Friedland and Alford, 1991) this paper seeks to address this gap by examining the implementation of disability legislation in professional football within England, Germany and Spain. This paper critically reviews both the actions of the governing bodies and clubs to interpret and implement services for Spectators with Disabilities (SwD). Our findings revealed a significant variance in the depth of policy implementation between these countries. This variation was due to the relationship between the prevailing institutional logic and the management of accessibility which resulted, or did not result in isomorphism occurring. The article concludes with implications for the management of sport and a call for further research into the implementation of equity policies.     

Effects of mat characteristics on plantar pressure patterns and perceived mat properties during landing in gymnastics

Shock absorption and stability during landings is provided by both, gymnast ability and mat properties. The aims of this study were to determine the influence of different mat constructions on their energy absorption and stability capabilities, and to analyse how these properties affect gymnast's plantar pressures as well as subjective mat perception during landing. Six mats were tested using a standard mechanical drop test. In addition, plantar pressures and subjective perception during landing were obtained from 15 expert gymnasts. The different mats influenced plantar pressures and gymnasts' subjective perception during landing of gymnasts. Significant correlations between plantar pressures at the medial metatarsal and lateral metatarsal zones of the gymnasts' feet with the different shock absorption characteristics of the mats were found. However, subjective perception tests were not able to discriminate mat functionality between the six mats as no significant correlations between the mechanical mat properties with the subjective perception of these properties were found. This study demonstrated that plantar pressures are a useful tool for discriminating different landing mats. Using similar approaches, ideally including kinematics as well, could help us in our understanding about the influences of different mats upon gymnast-mat interaction.     

The interdependence of language and translational math skills among bilingual hispanic engineering students

The performance of 43 Hispanic engineering and science majors on a task that consists of reading a sentence describing a mathematical relationship between two variables, and then writing an equation describing the relationship, is investigated in both English and Spanish. Results are compared with grade point average and with language proficiency. Comparison of the bilingual group to a monolingual group consisting of 52 engineering and science students shows that performance, as measured by either the mathematical translation task or grade point average, is more strongly correlated with language proficiency for the bilingual group. Clinical interviews conducted with samples from each group reveal large differences in the interpretation of the mathematical task between Hispanics and monolinguals. Suggestions are made for the improvement of the technical education of Hispanics.     

Performance-based university funding and the drive towards ‘institutional meritocracy’ in Italy

Many countries, including Italy, are increasingly managing their public higher education systems in accordance with the New Public Management principle that private-sector management practices improve efficiency and quality. A key mechanism has been the introduction of performance-based funding systems designed to reward ‘high-performing’ institutions and incentivise ‘lesser-performing’ institutions to improve. Instead of improving efficiency and quality across the board, however, we argue that performance-based funding systems naturalise longstanding structurally determined inequalities between institutions by recasting national higher education systems as competitive institutional meritocracies in which institutional inequalities are redefined as objective indicators of intrinsic ‘merit’ or worth. We illustrate how performance-based university funding systems naturalise pre-existing inequalities between universities drawing on the case of Italy, a country characterised by longstanding inequalities between its northern and southern regions which demonstrably impact on the apparent ‘performance’ of universities. The concept of institutional meritocracy captures the illusory nature of this performance game.     

The Evolution of the Concept of Capacitance Throughout the Development of the Electric Theory and the Understanding of Its Meaning by University Students

There are few didactic studies concerning the difficulties met by students inunderstanding the meaning of capacitance in a charged body. However, theunderstanding of capacitance can be a good indicator of the Students' learningof electrostatic theory in general. To describe Students' difficulties in learningthis concept we have considered, on the one hand, that individuals constructmental representations in order to help their understanding of the way a physicalsystem works under varied circumstances. On the other hand, a critical study ofthe history and epistemology of science is likely to enlighten us teachers andresearchers about the presence of qualitative leaps in the evolution of a concept.Thus, the consideration by teachers of these `discontinuities between meaningsfor the same concept, may lead them to understand Students' difficulties on learningit. We developed a historical study of the development of the capacitance conceptand an empirical study with students to identify historical and learning difficulties.The results obtained seem to show that most of the students who reason aboutaspects related to the charge of bodies and capacitance feel more comfortablewhen they talk in terms of charge than in terms of electric potential in a similarway to the first explanations of the early electric theories.     

Diary-based strategy assessment and its relationship to performance in a group of trainee teachers

Our work is based on the study of learning strategies used by a group of trainee teachers in a real learning situation, and how this use of strategies influences the results of the learning process. We use a diary as a tool to assess the learning strategies and compare the results obtained with those using an inventory. Our findings indicate that the deliberate use of strategies (measured by diaries) has a positive effect on knowledge acquisition, with the qualitative analysis method of the verbal protocols noted in the diaries proving more valuable than the use of traditional inventories.     

Adding automatic evaluation to interactive virtual labs

Automatic evaluation is a challenging field that has been addressed by the academic community in order to reduce the assessment workload. In this work we present a new element for the authoring tool Easy Java Simulations (EJS). This element, which is named automatic evaluation element (AEE), provides automatic evaluation to virtual and remote laboratories built with EJS by using the server application Goodle grading management system (GMS). The integration of both tools entitles a professor to create interactive virtual and remote laboratories and automatically evaluate the work of their students. As a test bed two case studies are presented; a non-linear controller design virtual laboratory used in an advanced control master course and a servomechanism virtual laboratory used in an undergraduate basic control course.     

Learning design and learning analytics in mobile and ubiquitous learning: A systematic review

Mobile and Ubiquitous Learning (m/u-learning) are finding an increasing adoption in education. They are often distinguished by hybrid learning environments that encompass elements of formal and informal learning, in activities that happen in distributed settings (indoors and outdoors), across physical and virtual spaces. Despite their purported benefits, these environments imply additional complexity in the design, monitoring and evaluation of learning activities. The research literature on learning design (LD) and learning analytics (LA) has started to deal with these issues. This paper presents a systematic literature review of LD and LA, in m/u-learning. Apart from providing an overview of the current research in the field, this review elicits elements of common ground between both communities, as shown by the similar learning contexts and complementary research contributions, and based on the research gaps, proposes to: address m/u-learning beyond higher education settings, reinforce the connection between physical and virtual learning spaces, and more systematically align LD and LA processes.     

Perceptual learning transfer in an appetitive Pavlovian task

In two experiments, rats were given intermixed or blocked preexposure to two similar compound stimuli, AX and BX. Following preexposure, conditioning trials took place in which AX (Experiment 1) or a novel compound stimulus NX (Experiment 2) was paired with a food-unconditioned stimulus in an appetitive Pavlovian preparation. Animals that were given alternated preexposure showed lower generalization from AX to BX (Experiment 1) and from NX to a new compound, ZX (Experiment 2), than animals that were given blocked preexposure, a perceptual learning and a perceptual learning transfer effect, respectively.