The role of coach-athlete relationship quality in team sport athletes’ psychophysiological exhaustion: implications for physical and cognitive performance

The present study aimed to examine associations between the quality of the coach-athlete relationship and athlete exhaustion by assessing physiological and cognitive consequences. Male and female athletes (N = 82) representing seven teams across four different sports, participated in a quasi-experimental study measuring physical performance on a 5-meter multiple shuttle test, followed by a Stroop test to assess cognitive performance. Participants provided saliva samples measuring cortisol as a biomarker of acute stress response and completed questionnaires measuring exhaustion, and coach-athlete relationship quality. Structural equation modelling revealed a positive relationship between the quality of the coach-athlete relationship and Stroop performance, and negative relationships between the quality of the coach-athlete relationship and cortisol responses to high-intensity exercise, cognitive testing, and exhaustion. The study supports previous research on socio-cognitive correlates of athlete exhaustion by highlighting associations with the quality of the coach-athlete relationship.     

Exploring the relationship between hope and burnout in competitive sport

Researchers have postulated that hope may be an important factor associated with burnout. Consistent with hope theory contentions, low-hope individuals may be susceptible to burnout because they are prone to experience goal blockage, frustration, and negative affect, all of which likely increase the risk of burnout. We examined the relationship between hope and athlete burnout among 178 competitive athletes (63 females and 115 males) aged 15-20 years. Hope was significantly and negatively correlated with all three burnout subscales: emotional/physical exhaustion, a reduced sense of accomplishment, and sport devaluation. Moreover, results of a multivariate analysis of variance showed that low-hope athletes scored significantly higher than medium- and high-hope athletes on all three burnout dimensions. Finally, results revealed that agency thinking was a significant predictor of all burnout dimensions. Frustration over unmet goals and a perceived lack of agency, a characteristic of low-hope athletes, might pose a risk factor in athlete burnout, whereas being able to maintain hope appears to be associated with health and well-being.     

Reconstructing Imagined Finnishness: The Case of Art Education through the Concept of Place

This multidisciplinary article presents a methodology, a research project and selected outcomes from an environmental art education course for teacher students. The course is part of an art education minor at the University of Helsinki, Department of Teacher Education. The students were asked to construct their place through an intertextual art method that provided them the means to study their place open‐endedly as a space of plural cultural meanings. Applying the results from their intertextual process, they reconstructed their place artistically. The end product was a personal work of art that included traces of their chosen places, and created a new meaning for it. The outcome is a visual space of compacted meanings from different places. Places contain history and memories important to identity construction. The results show that the intertextual reading extends the students’ concept of place as a space for relational and plural cultural meanings. Foucault's concept of heterotopia, as it applies to otherness of places and spaces, was used alongside the intertextual art method.     

The effect of multiple change processes on quality and completion rate of theses: a longitudinal study

Improving the quality of Bachelor’s and Master’s theses while at the same time increasing the number of theses without expanding the existing resources proportionately is a huge challenge faced by higher educational institutions. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of multiple change processes on Bachelors and Masters level thesis work in a selected higher educational institution. The following research questions were studied: (1) How has the thesis quality changed? (2) How has the number of completed theses changed? and, (3) How has the ratio of completed theses per supervisor changed? The change processes were introduced into the thesis process in the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV), Stockholm University during 2008–2014. The results show that the quality and the number of completed theses have significantly increased. The multiple change processes including a purpose built ICT system named SciPro, which was introduced and improved incrementally during 2010–2014 are discussed and evaluated in relation to these results.     

From elite traditions to middle-class cultures: images of secondary education in the anniversary books of a Finnish girls’ school, 1882–2007

This article concentrates on visual sources relating to secondary education, and asks how a collection of photographs can be understood and interpreted as part of the institutional and collective memory of one Finnish girls’ school. The photographs were published in the anniversary books of the school. They construct an entirety, where public memories are interwoven with individual and private reminiscences. The article examines how the traditions of jubilee books and the institutional setting of the school establish the boundaries for the visual narratives of the collection and how the self-image and identity of the school and its gendered nature are visualised in the corpus. The long period (1882–2007) opens up possibilities for studying how the changes in the Finnish education system and the alteration of the girls’ school to a co-educational school are presented in the photographs, and how these photographs create the imagery of gender, class, equality and co-education.     

Education returns of wage earners and self-employed workers: Comment

In a recent paper, García-Mainar and Montuenga-Gómez [García-Mainar, I. & Montuenga-Gómez, V. M. (2005). Education returns of wage earners and self-employed workers: Portugal vs. Spain. Economics of Education Review, 24(2), 161−170] apply the generalized IV model of Hausman and Taylor to estimate education returns of wage earners and the self-employed in Portugal and in Spain. Our examination reveals several problems which relate to the validity and documentation of the instrumental variables, as well as the robustness of the results.     

Evolution 2.0. The Unexpected Learning Experience of Making a Digital Archive

Studies in the history of science and education have documented that the reception and understanding of evolutionary theory is highly contingent on local factors such as school systems, cultural traditions, religious beliefs, and language. This has important implications for teaching evolution in primary and secondary schools. No universal strategy can be applied in overcoming the barriers of learning that exist and that are part of the practical and daily life in classrooms all over the world. In light of this, a huge challenge is to make high standard teaching materials fit to specific target audiences readily available. As more and more schools require teachers to use low cost or free web-based materials, in the research community we need to take seriously how to facilitate that demand in communication strategies on evolution. This article addresses this challenge by presenting the learning experience of making a digital archive of Danish Darwin editions that marked the beginnings of a series of public engagement and teaching initiatives including, among other things, comprehensive new websites, exhibits, lecture series, television documentaries, and a computer game.     

GENDER DIFFERENCES IN LEARNING OF THE CONCEPT OF FORCE, REPRESENTATIONAL CONSISTENCY, AND SCIENTIFIC REASONING

This quantitative case study used a pre- and posttest design for exploring the gender differences in secondary school students’ (n?=?131, 45 males and 86 females) learning of the force concept when an interactive engagement type of teaching was used. In addition, students’ ability to interpret multiple representations (i.e., representational consistency) was documented by a pre- and posttest and scientific reasoning ability by a pretest only. Males significantly outperformed females in learning of the force concept, pre- and posttest representational consistency, and pretest scientific reasoning. However, the gender difference in learning of the force concept was not significant when ANCOVA was conducted using pretest results of representational consistency and scientific reasoning as covariates. This appeared to indicate that the gender difference in learning gain was related to students’ abilities before the instruction. Thus, the teaching method used was equally effective for both genders. Further, our quantitative finding about the relation between representational consistency and learning of the force concept supports the assumption that multiple representations are important in science learning.