“Totally different standards”: consumer orientation in study abroad contexts

The paper takes an interest in consumer behavior in international higher education (HE). It takes qualitative narratives of international student experience as a point of departure for a discussion of the degree to which students conceive of their experience in consumer terms when they evaluate their stays abroad. Intentionally, the group of informants consists of culturally diverse subjects (Danish and Chinese students). While the size of the sample does not allow for any wide-ranging conclusions on the connection between cultural background and adoption of consumer identity, it enables the researchers to evaluate whether cultural background seems to pertain to the propensity of students to think and act in a consumer-oriented manner in their experience of the different material and academic standards they were faced with in their study abroad environment. Based on an interest in the role of the student in the era of academic capitalism, the study investigates whether the fact that universities increasingly operate on market and market-like conditions influences students’ way of conceiving of their study abroad experience. To what extent do students perceive themselves as consumers investing in services and products?     

Students’ test motivation in PISA: the case of Norway

Do students make their best effort in large-scale assessment studies such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)? Despite six cycles of PISA surveys from 2000 to 2015, empirical studies regarding students’ test motivation and experience of the tests are sparse. The present study examines students’ test motivation in PISA, and how closely students’ achievement correlates with students’ reported test motivation. A total of 40 students from eight schools that participated in the PISA study in 2006, 2009 and 2012 were interviewed. In addition, questionnaire data from a total of 9400 students who participated in PISA 2009 and 2012 were collected. The findings of this study indicate that students overall were motivated to do their best in the PISA study, despite the fact that these low-stakes tests have no impact on students’ grades or future school entrance. In contrast to claims in the media, where it has been suggested that Norwegian students are more relaxed towards the PISA test than students in other countries, students report that they are motivated to do their best, but girls report significantly higher test motivation than boys. Despite the policy influence of PISA and the large number of countries participating, very few studies have reported findings from students’ perspectives regarding their test motivation and experience of the test. The present study aims to fill that gap.     

Children’s Perspective on Learning: An International Study in Denmark,Estonia, Germany and Sweden

This article explores how some children in Denmark, Estonia, Germany and Sweden describe their perspective on learning. The aim of the international study is to gain knowledge of how preschool children in Sweden, Denmark, Estonia and Germany reflect and perceive their learning in preschool and other surrounding social contexts. The results are based on 51 focus group interviews from 181 children. The results indicate that, in general, children from all four countries seem to be aware of their own learning. One can conclude that encouraging children to think about what they are doing and why they are doing it makes the activities more goal-oriented from the children’s perspective and thus more conscious. Children are able to describe their own perspectives on learning.     

Reframing the field of gender and nursing education

The aim of this article is to explore how male students learn to practice nursing and the role of technology in their training process. The study is inspired by Bruno Latour's understanding of social interaction as an interplay between humans and technology. The students' use of the washcloth and the stethoscope, two significant nursing tools, is examined. Data were gathered using participant observation and informal conversation with a group of male Norwegian nursing students and their male teacher in a skills laboratory at University College. The article contributes a renewed understanding of gender and nursing education as well as a deepened understanding of how men adjust to a historically female profession such as nursing.     

Club Foot for football – on the (re)construction of meanings of music and football through a television title sequence

Abstract

This paper explores how music contributes to actualizing meaning potentials in a case of televised football. From the perspective of textual analysis – informed by multimodal discourse analysis and semiotics of music – the paper specifically focusses on the title music and demonstrates how the music contributes to offering impressions of 1) the characteristics of the editorial production of the programme, 2) the type and quality of content of the programme, and 3) for whom the programme and football are particularly relevant. The examination furthermore illustrates how a textual examination of title music should include an exploration of how the title music relates to music from outside the title sequence (transtextuality) as well as how the music relates to non-musical elements throughout the audio-visual sequence (cotextuality). In this respect, the paper presents a text analytical framework applicable to other examples of title music for football and sports programming.     

Kinematic differences between successful and faulty spikes in young volleyball players

ABSTRACT

This study was designated to investigate the kinematical differences between successful and faulty spikes, in order to identify the best strategies leading to better spike performance. Simulating a real-game condition, 13 elite youth attackers performed 6 spikes in the presence of 2 blocks. The kinematic variables of the spike performances were recorded using 6 optoelectronic cameras (Vicon Motion systems, Oxford, UK). The paired sample t-test was used to compare the kinematic variables recorded during the delivery of successful and faulty spikes. Among the successful trials, both the angular velocities of the knees (≈12.4%) and hips (≈13.3%), and the vertical velocity of the centre of mass at take-off (≈6.5%) and arm swing (≈8.2%) were considerably higher during the plant phase. Consequently, the jump (≈4.3%) and spike (≈1.5%) heights, as well as the wrist velocity (≈5.5%), were significantly higher during the jump phase of successful spikes. In successful spike performances, the attackers adopted higher hip and knee angular velocities, combined with efficient arm swings, to produce higher take-off velocities and reach higher jump heights. This approach provides them with the better position regarding the ball and the blockers to find the best path and hit the ball with higher arm velocities.     

Validity and Reliability of Trichotomous Achievement Goal Scale

The Trichotomous Achievement Goal Scale was developed by Agbuga and Xiang (2008 Agbuga, B. and Xiang, P. 2008. Achievement goals and their relations to self-reported persistence/effort in secondary physical education: A trichotomous achievement goal framework. Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 27: 179–191. [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) by including selected items from the scales of Duda and Nicholls (1992 Duda, J. L. and Nicholls, J. 1992. Dimensions of achievement motivation in schoolwork and sport. Journal of Educational Psychology, 84: 290–299. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), Elliot (1999 Elliot, A. J. 1999. Approach and avoidance motivation and achievement goals. Educational Psychologist, 34: 169–189. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), and Elliot and Church (1997 Elliot, A. J. and Church, M. A. 1997. A hierarchical model of approach and avoidance achievement motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72: 218–232. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and adapting them into Turkish. The scale consists of 18 items, and students rated each item on a 7-point Likert scale. To ascertain the validity and reliability of the Trichotomous Achievement Goal Scale, it was administered to 845 female and 861 male Turkish high school students attending three public schools in the 2008–2009 spring semester. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted, and Cronbach's alpha and Fornell and Larcker's (1981 Fornell, C. and Larcker, D. F. 1981. Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18: 39–50. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) criteria were tested on the items that measured the students' achievements, screening for the three distinct types of achievement goals proposed by the trichotomous framework. Based on the results of the study, the 16-item Trichotomous Achievement Goal Scale can be claimed as a valid a reliable scale.     

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.     

Producing curious affects: visual methodology as an affecting and conflictual wunderkammer

Digital video cameras, smartphones, internet and iPads are increasingly used as visual research methods with the purpose of creating an affective corpus of data. Such visual methods are often combined with interviews or observations. Not only are visual methods part of the used research methods, the visual products are used as requisites in interviews when interviewees are watching the recordings and share their reflections on these. The purpose of this article is to critically interrogate how such research apparatus, on the one hand, privilege a visual sense and, on the other hand, how the visual may turn into a multisensory knowledge situation, in which tense situations, un/expected and perhaps conflicting senses and un/comfortable affects are evoked. The article takes its point of departure in our analysis of a research apparatus we invented and used in the research project Schooling identities. In this project, 60 pupil review conversations with 13–15-year-old pupils were videotaped with the purpose of exploring the management of self-management. In 20 follow-up interviews with the pupils, the videos were played on an old television and used as memory triggers and initiators of reflection upon the affective experience of their own pupils’ review conversation. We argue that methods can be analytically scrutinised as affective “wunderkammers”, in which different realities are juxtaposed. In so doing, our ways of experiencing research and processes of subjectification are affected and complicated. We interrogate the intensification of this “wunderkammer” and the particularity of it, when a television is part of the apparatus. As Lisa Blackman reminds us, television may be a technology of intimacy, a medium of telepresence which makes certain mental touch and affective transfer processes such as empathy and suggestion possible. During the television-watching, the peer-review conversations were not only represented or memorised but the very experience of the conversation, the people and the tasks involved were revitalised. In the interviews, former lived reality, videotaped reality and presence were conflated. These moments of a new reality affected both pupils and ourselves as researchers intensely. The television-initiated loops of reflection worked as an affective and inventive trigger creating an intense situation. It may also affect the everyday life of school.