Understanding of the Earth in the presence of a satellite photo: A threefold enterprise

To acknowledge both conceptual and situational factors, children’s understanding of the Earth was considered from three angles: 1, the perspective as the physical point or direction from which something is seen or depicted; 2. conceptual frameworks; 3. the relevance of explanations in a situation. Fourteen children were interviewed individually in front of a poster of a satellite photo of the Earth. The interviews were semi-structured and focused on what the children understood was depicted in the poster and if they had seen the Earth. The effect of choice of perspective was demonstrated by children who only talked about how the Earth could be seen from space. The need to relate different conceptual frameworks became apparent with children, who meant that the Earth was situated in the direction of the sky. Different understandings of the relevance of an explanation were detected when the interviewer talked from the perspective in the room, but children talked about the perspective in the present poster. The results indicate that not only both conceptual frameworks and understanding of perspectives play a part when students encounter questions related to the concept of Earth, but also the students’ judgments of the relevance of different explanations in a situation.     

Accelerometer responsiveness to change between structured and unstructured physical activity in children and adolescents

This study examined if accelerometer-based assessments of physical activity were responsive to changes in physical activity level commensurate with performing structured versus unstructured activity in youth. Youth (6–16 years; N = 206) participated in a simulated after-school program that included structured and unstructured games on four occasions over a 3-year period. Recruitment occurred in 2007/2008 and data collection ended in 2011. Participants wore an Actigraph GT1M accelerometer on the hip. The Evenson cut-points were used to determine the time spent in each physical activity intensity, and standardized response means (SRM) were calculated and converted to standard effect sizes to be interpreted according to Cohen’s guidelines. SRMs ranged from trivial (0.16) to high (2.07), with the majority (75%) being classified as moderate or high. Our findings suggest that accelerometry was sensitive to differences in physical activity associated with structured compared to unstructured play, supporting the utility of accelerometry in evaluating activity-promoting interventions.     

Utility of the Youth Compendium of Physical Activities

Purpose: The purposes of this article are to: (a) describe the rationale and development of the Youth Compendium of Physical Activities (Youth Compendium); and (b) discuss the utility of the Youth Compendium for audiences in research, education, community, health care, public health, and the private sector. Methods: The Youth Compendium provides a list of 196 physical activities (PA) categorized by activity types, specific activities, and metabolic costs (youth metabolic equivalents of task [MET_y]) as measured by indirect calorimetry. The utility of the Youth Compendium was assessed by describing ways in which it can be used by a variety of audiences. Results: Researchers can use MET_y values to estimate PA levels and determine changes in PA in intervention studies. Educators can ask students to complete PA records to determine time spent in physical activities and to identify health-enhancing activities for classroom PA breaks. Community leaders, parents, and health care professionals can identify activity types that promote healthful behaviors. Public health agencies can use the MET_y values for surveillance and as a resource to inform progress toward meeting national physical activity guidelines. Applications for the private sector include the use of MET_y in PA trackers and other applications. Conclusion: The National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research Web site presents the Youth Compendium and related materials to facilitate measurement of the energy cost of nearly 200 physical activities in children and youth. The Youth Compendium provides a way to standardize energy costs in children and youth and has application for a wide variety of audiences.     

Measuring self-efficacy,aptitude to participate and functioning in students with and without impairments

Including vulnerable groups of students such as students with learning disabilities in mainstream school research, require ethical considerations and questionnaire adaptation. These students are often excluded, due to low understanding or methodologies generating inadequate data. Students with disability need be studied as a separate group and provided accessible questionnaires. This pilot study aims at developing and evaluating student self-reported measures, rating aspects of student experiences of school-based Physical Education (PE). Instrument design, reliability and validity were examined in Swedish secondary school students (n = 47) including students, aged 13, with intellectual disability (n = 5) and without impairment and test–retested on 28 of these students. Psychometric results from the small pilot-study sample were confirmed in analyses based on replies from the first wave of data collection in the main study (n = 450). Results show adequate internal consistency, factor structure and relations between measures. In conclusion, reliability and validity were satisfactory in scales to measure self-efficacy in general, in PE, and aptitude to participate. Adapting proxy ratings for functioning into self-reports indicated problems. Adequacy of adjustments made were confirmed and a dichotomous scale for typical/atypical function is suggested for further analyses.     

Intra-generational education: Imagining a post-age pedagogy

This article discusses the idea of intra-generational education. Drawing on Braidotti’s nomadic subject and Barad’s conception of agency, we consider what intra-generational education might look like ontologically, in the light of critical posthumanism, in terms of natureculture world, nomadism and a vibrant indeterminacy of knowing subjects. In order to explore the idea of intra-generationalism and its pedagogical implications, we introduce four concepts: homelessness, agelessness, playfulness and wakefulness. These may appear improbable in the context of education policy-making today, but they are born of theorising our practices in the age-transgressive field of Philosophy with Children. We argue that these concepts help to reconfigure intra-generational relations, ways of being and becoming. They express the longing, corporeality and visionary epistemology of nomadic enquiry. These inventions express a non-hierarchical philosophy of immanence. We draw some tentative conclusions about educational practices more generally.     

‘Drawing the Leaves Anyway’: Teachers Embracing Children’s Different Ways of Knowing in Preschool Science Practice

This study explores if and how teachers combine practices of science and of preschool (children 1–5 years old) into preschool science practice. Views of knowing may differ between science practices, traditionally associated with masculinity and rationality, and preschool practices, traditionally associated with femininity and caring. Recognising this, we have chosen to focus on how teachers’ talk constructs and relates to possible ways of gaining knowledge and reaching explanations of phenomena in preschool science. The analysis builds on two concept pairs often associated with gender as well as knowing: objective-subjective and logical-intuitive. The analysed material consists of 11 group interviews where preschool teachers talk about activities concerning science content. Our results show that several ways of knowing are possible in work with science content in preschool. These include ways of knowing more associated with subjectivity, such as ‘individual liking’ and ‘whole-body perception’, as well as more associated with objectivity, such as ‘noticing differences and similarities’. Furthermore, the results show that the teachers’ talk moves readily between possibilities associated with femininity (subjective and intuitive) and masculinity (objective and logical). This indicates that the teachers in this study have found ways to handle science in preschool that goes against presumed tensions between science and preschool practices. The results contribute to more nuanced ways of describing and thinking about science in preschool and pave the way for further development of science education in early childhood education.     

Body_machine? Encounters of the human and the mechanical in education,industry and science

This paper unveils the body_machine as a key element of dynamic mental maps that have come to shape both educational praxis and research. It traces and analyses instances in which the human and the mechanical encountered each other in metaphorical, material and visual forms, thereby blurring to some extent the boundaries between them while capturing and mobilising specific forms of knowing and acting. The paper studies, first, how certain ‘orienting frames of reference’ and associated ‘experimental systems’ managed to materialise around the body_machine and penetrate theory and praxis; and, second, what visual and textual sources related to a vocational school may reveal about where and how the body_machine has come to operate in education, industry and science. The paper centres on early twentieth-century photographs and analyses these not only as media presenting, representing and interrogating common thought and practice but also as agents of meaning-making around the body_machine.     

Vision for action in toddlers: the posting task

Three experiments examine 18- to 24-month-old (N = 78) toddlers' ability to spatially orient objects by their major axes for insertion into a slot. This is a simplified version of the posting task that is commonly used to measure dorsal stream functioning. The experiments identify marked developmental changes in children's ability to preorient objects for insertion, with 18-month-olds failing completely and 24-month-olds succeeding easily. In marked contrast, 18-month-olds preorient their empty hands for insertion into the same slots. This developmental dissociation between aligning hands and aligning objects to slots suggests that the key developmental change is in action with the goal of object-to-object alignment versus action on an object.     

Effects of working memory training on reading in children with special needs

This study examines the relationship between working memory and reading achievement in 57 Swedish primary-school children with special needs. First, it was examined whether children’s working memory could be enhanced by a cognitive training program, and how the training outcomes would relate to their reading development. Next, it was explored how differential aspects of working memory are related to children’s reading outcomes. The working memory training yielded effects, and these effects appeared beneficial to children’s reading comprehension development. Working memory measures were found to be related with children’s word reading and reading comprehension. The results show that working memory can be seen as a crucial factor in the reading development of literacy among children with special needs, and that interventions to improve working memory may help children becoming more proficient in reading comprehension.