Included or excluded? The dual influences of the organisational field and organisational practices on new female academics

A number of measures have been taken by the society to ensure gender equality in higher education. Nevertheless, women still face great difficulties when pursuing an academic career. Our aim is to increase the understanding of how the society, conceptualised as the organisational field, interacts with organisational factors and personal actions as women try to establish themselves within academia. We followed a group of female PhD students and their struggle to graduate at a Swedish, traditionally male‐dominated, university department. The paper analyses how actors and regulations in the society interact with the department’s gendered structures and practices. Three processes that influenced the women’s career opportunities have been identified – a process of integration, liberation and legitimatisation. We also show that women can get accepted and realise their short‐term objective, based on support from the society, while not necessarily being included by the department in a longer‐term perspective.     

Personality Traits Are Associated With Cortical Development Across Adolescence: A Longitudinal Structural MRI Study

How personality traits relate to structural brain changes in development is an important but understudied question. In this study, cortical thickness (CT) and surface area (SA), estimated using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), were investigated in 99 participants aged 8–19 years. Follow‐up MRI data were collected after on average 2.6 years for 74 individuals. The Big Five personality traits were related to longitudinal regional CT or SA development, but limited cross‐sectional relations were observed. Conscientiousness, emotional stability, and imagination were associated with more age‐expected cortical thinning over time. The results suggest that the substantial individual variability observed in personality traits may partly be explained by cortical maturation across adolescence, implying a developmental origin for personality–brain relations observed in adults.     

Predicting Achievement Goals in Two Different Academic Contexts: A longitudinal study

The relative contribution is examined of epistemological beliefs and implicit theories of intelligence to students' adoption of mastery, performance‐approach and performance‐avoidance goals in two different academic contexts, business administration and teacher education, in the short as well as the long term. The results showed that epistemological beliefs about the speed of knowledge acquisition predicted achievement goals. Students who believed that learning occurs quickly or not at all were less likely to adopt mastery goals and more likely to adopt performance‐avoidance goals. In addition, students who believed in stable and given knowledge were less likely to adopt mastery goals. Differences in predictive patterns across the two contexts concerned the prediction of performance‐approach goals and gender differences in goal adoption. Epistemological beliefs played a more important role in goal adoption than implicit theories of intelligence.     

Reproducibility of objectively measured physical activity: Reconsideration needed

ABSTRACT

Reliability of accelerometer-determined physical activity (PA), and thus the required length of a monitoring period, appears to depend on the analytic approach used for its calculation. We compared reliability of objectively measured PA using different resolution of data in a sample of 221 Norwegian 2–6-year-old children providing 2–3 valid 14-day periods of accelerometer monitoring (ActiGraph GT3X+) during September–October, January–February, and May–June 2015–2016. Reliability (intra-class correlation [ICC]) was measured for 1–14 days of monitoring across the measurement periods using linear mixed effect modelling. These results were compared to reliability estimated using different resolution of data using the Spearman–Brown formula. The measured reliability improved only marginally with increased monitoring length and levelled off after 5–6 days. Estimated reliability differed substantially when derived from different resolution of data: 3.9–5.4, 6.7–9.2, 13.4–26.7 and 26.3–87.7 days of monitoring was required to achieve an ICC = 0.80 using an hour-by-hour, a day-by-day, a week-by-week and a period-by-period approach, respectively. Reliability could not be correctly estimated from any single resolution of data. We conclude that reconsideration is needed with regard to how reproducibility of objectively measured PA is analysed and interpreted.     

What should a physical education teacher know? An analysis of learning outcomes for future physical education teachers in Sweden

Background: Research indicates that physical education teacher education (PETE) has only limited impact on how physical education (PE) is taught in schools. In this paper, our starting point is that the difficulties of challenging the dominating subject traditions in PE could be due to difficulties of challenging certain epistemological assumptions recurring in significant PETE subject matter and didactics courses.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to scrutinise how knowledge is expressed in learning outcomes formulated in curriculum documents at PETE institutions in Sweden and to discuss the potential educational consequences of the epistemological assumptions underlying the analysed expressions of knowledge.

Setting and participants: This paper offers possible explanations for the difficulties of influencing subject traditions in PE through analysing learning outcomes formulated in PETE curriculum documents. The analysis is based on 224 learning outcomes collected from a total of 18 course syllabi, spread at 6 PETE institutions in Sweden.

Research design, data collection and analysis: The documents have been collected through contact by e-mail with representatives for each institution. Through the analysis different themes in the material have been identified and clustered together. Inspired by Fenstermacher's ideas about teacher knowledge as propositional knowledge and performance knowledge, our ambition is to discuss the potential educational consequences of the epistemological assumptions underpinning the analysed learning outcomes.

Findings: In the collected learning outcomes, the following themes were identified: teaching PE, interpreting curriculum documents, physical movement skills, science, social health, pedagogy, critical inquiry, and research methods. In most of the identified themes, the learning outcomes represent both subject matter knowledge and general teacher knowledge and are also formulated with an integrated perspective on so-called performance knowledge and propositional knowledge. However, particularly in the themes science and physical movement skills, two very influential themes, the learning outcomes are limited to subject matter knowledge and the concept of knowledge in these themes is also limited and unilateral in relation to ideas of different forms of teacher knowledge.

Conclusions: We argue that a decontextualisation of knowledge, in this paper identified through dissolving science from its use in practice and through detaching physical movement skills from other conceptual foundations, contributes to the reproduction of subject traditions that render PE teachers incapable of critically reflecting over their practice, for instance how different groups of students benefit or suffer from the teaching of certain content. Drawing on the work of Tinning, we offer an explanation as to how teacher knowledge in the themes science and physical movement skills, emanating from behaviouristic and craft knowledge orientations, is formulated.     

Agency and structure in academic development practices: are we liberating academic teachers or are we part of a machinery supressing them?

This text taps into an ongoing discussion about academic development. It challenges an image of academic development as precarious and liminal and explores academic development as powerful. Sources of power are described and put into the context of values, ideologies, and policies governing higher education of today. It is our hope that readers will be inspired to problematise their own academic development practices and to reclaim a phase in the history of the profession where members displayed more of a political awareness.     

Technical efficiency and productivity for higher education institutions in Sweden

This study investigates technical efficiency and productivity for Swedish higher education institutions (HEIs). One identified problem in previous research concerns adjusting efficiency scores for input quality. This problem is avoided using grades from upper-secondary schools. A second problem concerns heterogeneity with respect to subjects and institutions between HEIs. Using the Swedish national resource allocation system, students are weighted according to subject. For research production, a bibliometric index that allows for differences in publication tradition is used. A third problem when using the data envelopment analysis approach is the lack of statistical inference. Bootstrapping is used to approach this problem. The results indicate an average inefficiency of 12% and a productivity increase of around 1.7% per year.     

Social impact of participatory health research: collaborative non-linear processes of knowledge mobilization

Social impact, defined as an effect on society, culture, quality of life, community services, or public policy beyond academia, is widely considered as a relevant requirement for scientific research, especially in the field of health care. Traditionally, in health research, the process of knowledge transfer is rather linear and one-sided and has not recognized and integrated the expertise of practitioners and those who use services. This can lead to discrimination or disqualification of knowledge and epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice is a situation wherein certain kinds of knowers and knowledge are not taken seriously into account to define a situation. The purpose of our article is to explore how health researchers can achieve social impact for a wide audience, involving them in a non-linear process of joint learning on urgent problems recognized by the various stakeholders in public health. In participatory health research impact is not preordained by one group of stakeholders, but the result of a process of reflection and dialog with multiple stakeholders on what counts as valuable outcomes. This knowledge mobilization and winding pathway embarked upon during such research have the potential for impact along the way as opposed to the expectation that impact will occur merely at the end of a research project. We will discuss and illustrate the merits of taking a negotiated, discursive and flexible pathway in the area of community-based health promotion.     

Comparison of Self-Reported Sedentary Time on Weekdays with an Objective Measure (activPAL)

ABSTRACT

Self-reports are commonly used tools for obtaining sedentary behaviors. The aim of our study was to assess agreement between two self-reports of sedentary time and a gold standard sedentary time objective monitor. A worksite sample (n = 42) completed the Slovenian version of the Global Physical Activity Questionnaire (GPAQ), the Slovenian version of the Sedentary Behaviour Questionnaire (SBQ for weekdays) and wore an objective physical activity monitor (activPAL) for up to five consecutive working days. Results revealed that GPAQ and SBQ consistently underestimated the total sedentary time, with the mean bias of ?165 min/day and ?181 min/day, respectably. Wide limits of agreement showed poor precision and intraclass correlation revealed a low level of agreement. GPAQ and SBQ are not recommended to be used in studies seeking for relationships with health outcomes, nor in studies where detecting the behavioral change is of interest. Objective measurement should be the preferred choice when possible.     

Sport physiology research and governing gender in sport—a power–knowledge relation?

This article sets out to show how physiological knowledge about sex/gender relates to power issues within sport. The sport physiology research at the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences (Swedish acronym: GIH) during the twentieth century is analysed in relation to the political rationality concerning gender at GIH and within the Swedish Sports Confederation during the same period. The analysis is constituted by Michel Foucault's notion of power–knowledge relations and regimes oftruth. The construction of sex/gender in the physiological research changes over time. Comparative studies on the function of ‘sexual difference’ during strenuous work, which, in hindsight, might be seen to restrict women's sport participation, was gradually displaced by a lack of interest in sexual difference, and later by a growing fascination with sexual difference from a ‘gender perspective’ in terms of women being ‘different but equal’ to men. This displacement goes hand in hand with a displacement of the political rationality concerning gender at GIH and within the Swedish Sports Confederation, where a pre-World War II strategy of excluding women's competitive sport participation, restricting women's physical exercise to gymnastics, was after 1945 followed by a strategy of including women. This was at first in the name of ‘women's right to do sport’—where the physiological research advocated this endeavour—and later in the name of ‘women's right to do sport on their own terms’. However, the research was still being conducted based on the male physiology as the norm.