Elite cricket coach education: a Bourdieusian analysis

The social structures within coach education have been largely unexplored, undiscussed, and treated as unproblematic in contributing to coach learning, both in research and practice. The study used semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 11 elite cricket coaches to gather their perceptions of an elite coach education programme. In particular, this research attempted a more nuanced critical inquiry into the impact of culture on coach learning, habitus on knowledge production and the extent to which capital structures practice within the field of cricket coach education. Data analysis followed abductive reasoning, combining inductive thematic analyses of the data, with a deductive abstraction of these themes within a Bourdieusian framework to provide a level of explanation to the data. The findings present coach education as a complex social field in which coaches were active social beings in the (re)production of coaching knowledge. The culture of cricket was found to perpetuate a powerful doxic system that highlighted the tensions and conflict between an accepted model of coach education with a singular and prescribed body of knowledge and a strong underlying sporting culture and individuals hierarchically placed within it. This data further highlighted how coach education contributes to the (re)production of power within the field of cricket coaching.     

Humor and anxiety: Effects on class test performance

Measures of trait anxiety, state anxiety, and achievement were obtained on a sample of undergraduate students, half of whom received additionaal humorous items in the achievement test. In a regression analysis, the trait anxiety × test version interaction was a significant predictor of achievement. Subsequent analyses revealed a disordinal interaction in which highly anxious students had lower achievement on the humorous test than on the nonhumorous test, and students with low anxiety had higher achievement on the humorous test than did students with high anxiety. The results do not support the popular assumption that humor is a positive factor in reducing high anxiety associated with academic evaluations.     

Community College Organizational Climate for Minorities and Women

This paper explores the issues of what would constitute a positive organizational climate for women and minorities within the community college setting and ways in which such a climate might be achieved. It first describes some traditional or standard measures of a positive organizational climate for women and minorities and then evaluates how well the community college is doing when examined against these measures. Next, it describes some structural manifestations of a negative climate, including negative discourse about minorities and women. In doing so, it traces the development of some discourse patterns about these groups and provides some illustrative cultural assumptions that reflect these discourse patterns. The paper concludes with implications for the community college, including some steps to be taken to improve the organizational climate for minorities and women.     

Needs of elementary and middle school teachers developing online courses for a virtual school

Eight teams of elementary and middle school teachers developed pilot online courses for the North Carolina Virtual Public School (NCVPS) in the USA. A qualitative case study with focus groups and a follow‐up survey helped to identify common needs of these non‐traditional course designers during course development efforts. Findings suggest virtual schools can better support non‐traditional course designers by providing leadership components such as technical expertise, regular feedback, and clear expectations, including an understanding of the target students. Findings further suggest designers need a range of bite‐sized professional development on replicating model courses, using course management systems, assessing learners online, designing with copyright and safety issues in mind, integrating Web tools, and developing course documentation for deployment. The article concludes with a discussion of support structures that may aid instructors tasked with online course development.     

SAPPHO updated - project SAPPHO phase II

Project SAPPHO consists of a comparative analysis of ‘paired’ successful and unsuccessful technological innovations, where one half of the pair is a commercial success and the other a commercial failure. In phase I of the project twenty-nine pairs were investigated, seventeen in chemical processes and twelve in scientific instruments. Five main areas of difference between successful and unsuccessful innovators emerged which related to the innovator's understanding of user needs, efficiency of development, characteristics of managers, efficiency of communications and marketing and sales efforts.In phase II, the project has been extended to include a new total of forty-three pairs, twenty-two in chemical processes and twenty-one in scientific instruments. The results of phase I have been confirmed with the same five underlying factors emerging as strongly differentiating between success and failure and with some inter-industry differences becoming clearer. These differences, by and large, relate to the basic structural and environmental differences which exist between the two industries.Following the statistical analysis a subjective review was made of thirty-four failure cases, and those factors which contributed maximally to the individual failures were identified. The results of this exercise support the results of the statistical analysis, but they also highlight some new and significant factors. Finally, some of the more important of the many hypotheses which have been forwarded as offering explanations for innovative success were tested in the tight of the phase II SAPPHO results.     

Notes on the inter-industrial flow of technology in post-war Britain

On the basis of the analysis of the originators and the first users of more than 1600 significant innovations in Britain since the Second World War, it appears that the performance-maximising industries (where technological change is a critical feature of competitiveness and growth) are the main source of these innovations, the majority of which are used in other types of industry, and particularly in the cost-minimising industries, and in the salesmaximising (consumer goods) industries.     

Can ‘pooling teaching tips’ be more than ‘pooling teaching tips’?

Tertiary Education and Management - There is increasing interest in how academic development of various kinds influences university teaching and student learning. To date the focus has been on...