Epistemic Beliefs in Science—A Systematic Integration of Evidence From Multiple Studies

Educational Psychology Review - Recent research has integrated developmental and dimensional perspectives on epistemic beliefs by implementing an approach in which profiles of learners’...     

Möglichkeiten außerschulischer Hilfen in der Bearbeitung von Bildungsbenachteiligung: Potenziale und Grenzen ausgewählter Handlungsfelder der Jugendsozialarbeit

Even though social inequalities in education are often dealt with in out-of-school social work programs, this has been largely neglected by educational research in recent years. The present paper therefore presents the different fields of action in youth social work as means of compensatory education and discusses research findings regarding its use and effectiveness. The difficulty of measuring their effectiveness is not only due to a fragmented research field, but also reflects the fundamental contradiction between structural problems and their pedagogical treatment. The paper ends with a reflection on the importance of out-of-school programs to help adolescents with difficult course of lives.     

Concrete Geometry: Playing with Blocks

This article describes a design/build exercise conducted in an Architectural Materials and Methods class to achieve three interrelated objectives: (1) to apply physically the semester's theoretical focus on the constituent process and languages of architecture investigations, (2) to capitalise on the physical and aesthetic properties of concrete masonry to explore fabrication and detailing in the design process, and (3) to examine preconceptions about solo work and team work in architectural education and practice. What makes this project unique among other design/build projects is its emphasis on Concrete Masonry Units (known as CMU in the USA) and their visual, tactile and functional properties. The junior and senior students were allowed three building elements: an 8′ cube of space, an unlimited number of concrete blocks, and the visual ecology of a site. The structural vocabulary that Frank Lloyd Wright developed consisted of a three‐dimensional field of lines through which the solid elements of the building were located, enabling the voids to be integral to the whole and equally meaningful. Using these elements, students were asked to design/build temporary structures in a field next to the airport hangar on campus. The pedagogical objective was to adopt Wright's creative spirit, as opposed to quoting his architectural language.     

Exploring the Attractiveness of a Norwegian Rural Higher Education Institution Using Importance-Performance Analysis

High school graduates in rural counties often move to urban areas to study at higher education institutions (HEIs). Because graduates from HEIs often settle in regions in which they graduate, the result is a permanent out-migration of young talent from rural areas. This study adds to the body of literature on student choice by addressing measures that can make a university located in a rural region more attractive to local high school graduates. Empirical data are gathered from potential students at the University of Nordland, located in northern Norway. Importance-performance analysis and gap analysis are applied to study the factors that are most important for students. As a result, this study serves as a good starting point for small rural universities in understanding local students and devising methods to increase attractiveness for this group so that more young talent might choose to remain in rural areas.     

Conflicting goals of educational action: a study of teacher agency from a transactional realism perspective

This study focuses on the different ways in which teachers relate their situational agency and professional assignment to the national curriculum content and curriculum dilemmas. It builds theoretically on transactional realism and empirically on analyses of interviews with teachers, exploring the nature of teacher agency during the enactment of a new Swedish curriculum reform. To uphold a dual perspective of teachers’ relation to the curriculum as both collectively and individually experienced and as both an ideal and realistic–practical relation, we term the future as ‘projective experiences’, the presence as ‘practical-evaluative experiences’ and the past ‘iterational experiences’ in relation to agency. Especially, we are interested in the ‘what’ in the curriculum – what the teachers find intriguing, important or impossible and what affects how they relate to the curriculum as part of the multidimensional structures influencing their agency. This approach reveals that the crucial issue of teacher agency is related to the policy discourse on knowledge and equity as standards and the uniformity of assessment and its pedagogical consequences.     

Zum Nutzen von Kooperationen für Volkshochschulen

Cooperation among organisations is a common practice in the area of continuing education. It is facilitated by education policy guidelines, initiatives and funding programs. However, it is still mostly unresolved, which specific advantages are realised by cooperation in the field of continuing education. The following article examines the effect of cooperation among adult education centres in increasing attendance in their continuing education courses. The examination is based on the statistics of adult education centres. The analysis is based on panel data, which help to identify causal connections between courses of cooperation and attendance. The results show that cooperation results in additional educational opportunities and thus increases the attendance numbers. In addition, cooperation among adult education centres holds the potential to attract previously unreached participants.     

Back to the Future – in support of a renewed emphasis on generic agility training within sports-specific developmental pathways

Perhaps as a consequence of increased specialism in training and support, the focus on engendering and maintaining agility as a generic quality has diminished within many contemporary sports performance programmes. Reflecting this, we outline a rationale suggesting that such a decreased focus represents an oversight which may be detrimental to maximising the potential of performers. We present an evidence-based argument that both generic and specific elements of agility performance should be consistently emphasised within long-term performance-training programmes. We contend that prematurely early specialisation in athlete development models can diminish focus on generic movement skill development with a subsequent detriment in adult performance. Especially when this is coupled with poor primary physical education and limited movement experiences. More speculatively, we propose that generic agility can play a role in operationalising movement development through facilitating skill transfer: thereby enabling the learning of new skills, reduce incidence of injury and facilitating re-learning of old skills during rehabilitation and Return-to-Play processes.     

Heart rate and movement pattern in street soccer for homeless women

Street soccer has been shown to be effective in improving cardiovascular and musculoskeletal fitness in homeless men, due to high heart rate (HR) and multiple intense actions. The purpose of this study was to investigate HR, movement pattern, rating of perceived exertion (RPE), flow and worry during street soccer for homeless women. Fifteen homeless women (30.3?±?5.0?years [± standard deviation, SD], 1.65?±?0.08?m, 65.1?±?11.0?kg, 5?±?4?years football experience) from three countries participated in 4?a-side street soccer games in Women’s Homeless World Cup 2015. Mean and peak HR were 174?±?7 and 188?±?10?beats per minute (bpm), respectively, and >160 bpm 76?±?23% of the playing time (11.1?±?2.6?min). Distance covered per minute was 68.6?±?8.9?m of which 82?±?14, 15?±?6 and 3?±?3% were covered with low- (0–9?km/h), moderate- (9–13?km/h) and high-speed (>13?km/h) running, respectively. The 43?±?5, 45?±?3 and 12?±?3% of the distance were covered running forward, sideways, and backward, respectively. Player Load was 9.2?±?1.7?arbitrary units (AU) per minute and the number of accelerations >1.5?ms^–2 was 15.3?±?2.7 per minute. The score for flow was high (5.5?±?0.8), whereas rating of perceived exertion (RPE) values (4.8?±?2.5) and the score for worry (4.6?±?1.3) were moderate. Street soccer for homeless women elicits high HR and a movement pattern comparable and for some parameters even higher than street soccer and recreational football for homeless and untrained men. Street soccer may be a suitable training intervention for homeless women, and especially moderate RPE and high flow score speaks in favour of an expectation of high participation and adherence.     

Effects of the Nordic Hamstring exercise on sprint capacity in male football players: a randomized controlled trial

This assessor-blinded, randomized controlled superiority trial investigated the efficacy of the 10-week Nordic Hamstring exercise (NHE) protocol on sprint performance in football players.

Thirty-five amateur male players (age: 17–26 years) were randomized to a do-as-usual control group (CG; n = 17) or to 10-weeks of supervised strength training using the NHE in-season (IG; n = 18). A repeated-sprint test, consisting of 4 × 6 10 m sprints, with 15 s recovery period between sprints and 180 s between sets, was conducted to evaluate total sprint time as the primary outcome. Secondary outcomes were best 10 m sprint time (10mST) and sprint time during the last sprint (L10mST). Additionally, peak eccentric hamstring strength (ECC-P_HS) and eccentric hamstring strength capacity (ECC-CAP_HS) were measured during the NHE.

Ten players were lost to follow-up, thus 25 players were analyzed (CG n = 14; IG n = 11). Between-group differences in mean changes were observed in favor of the IG for sprint performance outcomes; TST (?0.649 s, p = 0.056, d = 0.38), 10mST (?0.047 s, p = 0.005, d = 0.64) and L10mST (?0.052 s, p = 0.094, d = 0.59), and for strength outcomes; ECC-P_HS (62.3 N, p = 0.006, d = 0.92), and ECC-CAP_HS (951 N, p = 0.005, d = 0.95).

In conclusion, the NHE showed small-to-medium improvements in sprint performance and large increases in peak eccentric hamstring strength and capacity.

Trial Registration Number: NCT02674919     

Infant-directed speech does not always involve exaggerated vowel distinctions: Evidence from Danish

This study compared the acoustic properties of 26 (100% female, 100% monolingual) Danish caregivers' spontaneous speech addressed to their 11- to 24-month-old infants (infant-directed speech, IDS) and an adult experimenter (adult-directed speech, ADS). The data were collected between 2016 and 2018 in Aarhus, Denmark. Prosodic properties of Danish IDS conformed to cross-linguistic patterns, with a higher pitch, greater pitch variability, and slower articulation rate than ADS. However, an acoustic analysis of vocalic properties revealed that Danish IDS had a reduced or similar vowel space, higher within-vowel variability, raised formants, and lower degree of vowel discriminability compared to ADS. None of the measures, except articulation rate, showed age-related differences. These results push for future research to conduct theory-driven comparisons across languages with distinct phonological systems.