A Behavioural Evaluation of Dance Instruction with Students Who Have Special Needs

A dance programme for a class of students with special needs was evaluated using a multiple baseline across behaviours design where the behaviours were movements representing aspects of the elements of dance: Space, Body Awareness, Relationships, Levels, Effort, Speed and Shape. Observational data showed that the instructional dance programme was successful in extending the variety of movements performed by the students and that the observational methodology designed for the study was a useful strategy for evaluating teaching in dance.     

Postpartum depression, marital dysfunction, and infant outcome: a longitudinal study

This longitudinal study explores the relationship of postpartum depression (PPD) and marital dysfunction on infant outcomes from birth to 2 1/2 years of age among middle-class, postpartum women. Participants were recruited during the prenatal period. Twelve mothers completed the study throughout a 2 1/2-year period. Questionnaires, semistructured interviews, and observations were used to collect data. Content analysis of the interviews (Morse & Field, 1995) was conducted and thematic patterns were identified. Clinical PPD and marital dysfunction (defined as little or no support or closeness, or verbal, emotional or physical abuse) characterized nearly one in three mothers. Four themes describing the women's postpartum progression were identified: stress, isolation, resentment, and eventual adjustment by creating a new normal. No major developmental delays or behavioral problems were found among the infants. Eight of the 12 mothers who were initially identified as breastfeeding nursed their infants for 6-18 months. Regardless of financial and educational advantages, mothers in the study experienced depression and marital dysfunction. These findings support other studies that confirm the lack of association of PPD with social class or marital status. Childbirth educators and other health care professionals are encouraged to continue providing expectant families with anticipatory education and community resources in order to increase awareness of mental health and marital risks during the postpartum transition.     

Discovering the Laws of Sampling

That the sample mean and variance are “good” estimates of the corresponding population parameters is easily accepted as “obvious” by students, but the concept of standard error of the mean is often found to be quite a hurdle. That this standard error decreases inversely as the square-root of the sample size, and the mysterious appearance of the Normal distribution, are often taken as magical and incomprehensible effects, and non-mathematical students can often be turned away from further understanding. This article describes a program which provides an experimental framework in which the student can rapidly develop an intuition for the basic properties of sampling.     

Designing minimal computer manuals from scratch

We designed from scratch a minimal manual of the kind proposed by Carroll (1990) for Unix e-mail. The design process involved acquiring from a set of experts information about e-mail use that would be helpful to novices, and acquiring from novices information that guided subsequent versions of the manual. The seventh version of the minimal manual was tested against a commercial manual, in a comparative performance experiment, with 30 naive subjects. It had approximately 13% of the pages of the commercial manual; it resulted in 30% faster learning and more effective use of the e-mail system overall, and significantly better performance on individual subtasks; including the recovery from errors. Significantly more users were satisfied with it than with the conventional manual. Carroll's general principles of manual design for minimal manuals were found to be a good basis for design, and we suggest these guidelines are suitable for the design of such manuals from scratch.