Managing arterial health in adults with metabolic diseases: Is high-intensity interval exercise the answer? Response to the commentary by Lopes et al.

Dear editor, We thank Lopes et al.1 for their interest in our study and for writing an insightful commentary based on our findings, which were recently publishe...     

How much,how often,how well? Adherence to a neuromuscular training warm-up injury prevention program in youth basketball

ABSTRACT

Adherence is a key implementation outcome that determines the effectiveness of an intervention. This study, an observational design involving coaches and players from 33 high school basketball teams, evaluated the dimensions of adherence to a basketball-specific neuromuscular training (NMT) warm-up program in youth basketball. Coach adherence (daily report of team adherence) was collected prospectively. Adherence measures: cumulative utilization (proportion of total sessions possible), utilization fidelity (average # of exercises completed per NMT session), utilization frequency (average # of NMT sessions completed per week) were calculated and further evaluated for optimal adherence (≥80%, ≥10.4 exercises/session and ≥2 sessions/week, respectively) per coach. Additionally, exercise fidelity (proportion of players performing individual exercises correctly) was assessed. Coach (n = 31; 27–59 years) median cumulative utilization was 80%, utilization fidelity was 12 (of a possible 13 exercises per session) and utilization frequency was 2.3 sessions per week. Optimal adherence ranged from 52% to 71% across measures of adherence. Player exercise fidelity was 48%. Time constraint (47%) was the most frequently reported adherence barrier. While coach adherence to the NMT warm-up program was reasonably high across measures of adherence, a considerable proportion of coaches did not attain optimal adherence levels and player exercise fidelity was low.     

“A Prostitution Alike of Matter and Spirit”: Anti-War Discourses in Children’s Literature and Childhood Culture Before and During World War I

Histories of the First World War have regularly implicated children’s literature in boys’ eagerness to enlist in the first two years of that conflict. While undoubtedly the majority of children’s books, comics and magazines did espouse nationalistic, jingoistic and martial attitudes, there were alternative stories and environments. Looking at the publications, organisations and educational establishments that opposed the war and resisted the Germanophobia that began to dominate public discourse at the start of the twentieth century casts new light on some of the challenges and dilemmas facing a proportion of boys as they decided whether or not to join up. Additionally, the fact that there were alternative discourses is a reminder that not all readers would have responded in the same way to the same texts. Three areas are considered: children’s stories and pamphlets produced by Quakers and peace societies; left-wing publications, especially those associated with Socialist Sunday Schools; and two of the first progressive schools in Britain.     

Redundancy and expertise reversal effects when using educational technology to learn primary school science

Two experiments using the science topics of Magnetism and Light were conducted with younger learners (Year 5) who had no prior knowledge of the topics, and older learners (Year 6) who had studied the topics previously. Half of the learners were presented the information in auditory form only while the other half were presented the auditory information simultaneously with a visual presentation. Results indicated that older students with prior knowledge of the topic learned more from the auditory only presentation. For these students, the addition of visual information was redundant and so they were disadvantaged by the use of an audio-visual presentation. However, for younger students with no prior knowledge of the topic, the difference between means reversed. Some of these students might require a visual presentation to make sense of the auditory explanation. These two sets of results were discussed in the context of the redundancy and the expertise reversal effect.     

Re-engaged students’ perceptions of mainstream and flexible learning environments – a ‘semi-quantitative’ approach

ABSTRACT

Flexible Learning Options (FLOs) attempt to enable secondary school completion by young people for whom ‘mainstream’ schooling has not worked well. Despite their proliferation and the increased research attention to understanding the mechanisms at work within such programmes, quantitative methods have not been utilised to compare participants’ perceptions of the learning environments of FLOs and mainstream schools. This study describes the development and application of a quantitative instrument to assess re-engaged Australian students’ perceptions of an FLO relative to their previous (mainstream) schools. Findings indicate that, on average, young people rate the learning environment more highly at the FLO than at the mainstream school from which they disengaged, indicating that the learning environment of the FLO aligns more closely with the needs of its student cohort. However, bimodal results for some instrument items highlight that the learning environment is influential, but not necessarily a precondition of school disengagement or re-engagement. Implications of this study are considered, with attention to the complexities that mainstream schools and FLOs negotiate in creating effective learning environments for diverse young people.     

Making sense of theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches: Exploring conceptual change and interest in learning from a sociocultural perspective

Educational psychology has a tradition of considering learning and motivation in terms of the individual and individual functioning. Short-term intervention studies have been common and quantitative measurement of the causes and effects of variables has been the aim of much research. When a sociocultural approach forms the basis of research into psychological constructs, a reappraisal of the research aims and the ways in which data are gathered and analysed is necessary. If the underlying assumption is that learning and motivation are socially and culturally situated, the design of research studies needs to encompass participation in authentic and purposeful activities. In order to develop a rich sociocultural understanding of these constructs, qualitative research designs become increasingly important. In this article, we consider two current research projects, one focusing upon conceptual change amongst students in a first year university class, and the other a classroom-based qualitative study exploring primary (elementary) students’ interest in learning. In each project, data have been collected over time in relation to both social interaction and individual functioning in specific sociocultural contexts. Our frameworks for data collection and approaches to data analysis are discussed in this article, together with some of the issues which we have identified as problematic. In particular we are conscious of the difficulties associated with articulating and describing the nature of social and cultural contexts, especially those with which we are familiar, and of distinguishing their most salient features. We are also critically aware that because our research is situated within very familiar environments, we need to identify and explore our implicit assumptions about those environments and the ways in which our roles as teachers and researchers both coincide and occasionally conflict.     

The company of others: generating knowhow in later life

Abstract

This paper explores some important aspects of the generation of practical knowledge through later life. It is about the relationship between knowledge generation, agency and capability, developed informally through the life experiences in and through the Company of Others. It emphasises how the everyday processes of socialisation create invaluable opportunities to know how to navigate the diverse and complex changes thrown up in the journey through later life. It asks where and how knowhow is generated after workforce participation ceases and pays particular attention to ‘third places’, opportunities in the community that enable social connections beyond the first and second places, home and work, respectively. The empirical and theoretical data come from two main Australian sources amplified by new international research in cognate fields. The first is a study about Generating knowhow in later life. The second derives from insights from research for a book into the origins and nature of the now international Men’s Shed Movement.     

Mechanisms of multidimensional grouping,fusion, and search in avian texture discrimination

The influence of dimensional organization on pigeon texture perception was examined in a simultaneous conditional discrimination procedure. Six experienced pigeons were reinforced for pecking at a small block oftarget elements randomly located within a larger array ofdistractor elements in each texture stimulus. Target/distractor differences in color, size, orientation, and combinations of these dimensions were examined. In Experiment 1, the influence of target/distractor similarity on performance was investigated by using different forms of unidimensional and conjunctively organized texture stimuli made of two and three dimensions. Targets infeature displays, in which the two regions consistently differed along a single dimension, were located more accurately than targets inconjunctive displays, where a combination of values from all dimensions defined each region. In Experiment 2, a tradeoff between response speed and accuracy was found in the pigeons’ processing of conjunctive displays. In Experiment 3, the number of distractors differentially influenced the localization of feature and conjunctive targets. Overall, the pigeons’ reactions to these feature and conjunctive stimuli paralleled those of humans, suggesting that functionally equivalent mechanisms may mediate the perceptual grouping, search, and discrimination of textured multidimensional stimuli in both species.