Who's the winner? Children's math learning in competitive and collaborative scenarios

Games are frequently used to promote math learning, yet the competitive and collaborative contexts introduced by games may exacerbate gender differences. In this study, 1st and 2nd grade children in the U.S. (ages 5–8; N = 274; 70% White, 15% Asian, 2% Black, 1% Native American, 14% mixed or other race; 17% Hispanic) played either a competitive, collaborative, or solo game to learn about a challenging novel math concept: proportion. Overall, both social contexts boosted perseverance and task attitudes. However, analyses revealed the competitive condition yielded gender differences in attention to proportion in the presence of competing cues, with older boys underperforming in the competition condition. Potential explanations for these findings, as well as implications for classroom math learning, are discussed.     

Stability of psychometric questionnaires

In 1999, Wilson and Batterham proposed a new approach to assessing the test–retest stability of psychometric questionnaires. They recommended assessing the proportion of agreement – that is, the proportion of participants that record the same response to an item – using a test–retest design. They went on to use a bootstrapping technique to estimate the uncertainty of the proportion of agreement. The aims of this short communication are (1) to demonstrate that the sampling distribution of the proportion of agreement is well known (the binomial distribution), making the technique of ‘bootstrapping’ redundant, and (2) to suggest a much simpler, more sensitive method of assessing the stability of a psychometric questionnaire, based on the test–retest differences (within-individuals) for each item. Adopting methods similar to Wilson and Batterham, 97 sport students completed the Social Physique Anxiety Scale on two occasions. Test–retest differences were calculated for each item. Our results show that the proportion of agreement ignores the nature of disagreement. Items 4 and 11 showed similar agreement (44.3% and 43.3% respectively), but 89 of the participants (91.8%) differed by just - 1 point when responding to item 4, indicating a relatively stable item. In contrast, only 78 of the participants (80.4%) recorded a difference within - 1 point when responding to item 11, suggesting quite contrasting stability for the two items. We recommend that, when assessing the stability of self-report questionnaires using a 5-point scale, most participants (90%) should record test–retest differences within a reference value of - 1.     

Effects of 72-h of exercise abstinence on affect and body dissatisfaction in healthy female regular exercisers

Abstract

In this study, we compared the effects of a 72-h exercise abstinence period and normal exercise on the affect and body dissatisfaction of 58 healthy women (mean age 26.1 years, s = 8.2) who exercised at least four times per week, and explored the relationship between the changes in affect and body dissatisfaction. Participants completed the UWIST-MACL and Body Dissatisfaction Scale to assess affect and body image, and were randomized to an abstinence or control group. Affect and body image for both groups were re-assessed following the 72-h abstinence period. Compared with the control group, the abstinence group had a significant decrease in hedonic tone and energetic arousal, and a significant increase in tense arousal and body dissatisfaction from pre-intervention to post-intervention. There were no significant relationships between the changes in body dissatisfaction and the components of affect. A 72-h exercise abstinence period resulted in increased affect disturbance and body dissatisfaction in regularly active women.     

Influence of bicompartmental knee replacement on stand-to-sit movement

Knee osteoarthritis often occurs in medial and patellofemoral compartments. A bicompartmental knee replacement system replaces these two affected knee compartments and keeps the lateral compartment and cruciate ligaments intact. It is yet to be determined whether limbs with bicompartmental knee systems can demonstrate frontal-plane knee mechanics and hamstring coactivation similar to healthy control limbs during daily activities requiring the weight-bearing knees to bend through a large range of motion (e.g., stand-to-sit). Three-dimensional knee mechanics and quadriceps and hamstring electromyographic data were collected from 8patients with a unilateral bicompartmental knee system and 10 healthy control participants. No differences in frontal-plane knee mechanics and hamstring coactivation were found among the surgical, contralateral, and control limbs during stand-to-sit (p > .05).     

Move over Nelly: lessons from 30 years of employment-based initial teacher education in England

Recruiting, preparing and retaining high-quality teachers are recurrent themes of local, national and international education agendas. Traditional university-led forms of teacher education continue to be challenged, and defended, as nations strive to secure a teaching force equipped to achieve high-quality learning outcomes for all students. One commonly adopted policy solution has been the diversification of teacher preparation routes: the alternative certification agenda. In this article, we examine the entire history of one alternative route in place in England from 1997 to 2012, the Graduate Teacher Programme. Using one example of an employment-based programme, we argue that opportunities to engineer innovative and creative spaces in the face of the current teacher preparation reform agenda need to be seized. This case study, which is contextualised in both the international debates about alternative teacher certification routes and the current policy agenda in England, demonstrates the extent to which successive administrations have failed to learn from the lessons of the past in the rush to recycle policies and claim them as their own.     

The influence of framing on transfer: initial evidence from a tutoring experiment

This paper investigates the idea that the framing of learning and transfer contexts can influence students’ propensity to transfer what they have learned. We predicted that transfer would be promoted by framing contexts in an expansive manner in which students are positioned as having the opportunity to contribute to larger conversations that extend across time, places, people, and topics. A one-on-one tutoring experiment was conducted to test this hypothesis by manipulating framing as either expansive or its opposite (bounded) within a complex instructional learning ecology. We investigated the degree to which high school biology students transferred knowledge from a learning session about the cardiovascular system to a transfer-of-learning session about the respiratory system depending on framing condition. Consistent with the framing hypothesis, students in the expansive condition were generally more likely to transfer facts, a conceptual principle, and a learning strategy from one system to another.     

The Role of Family Verbal Aggression and Taking Conflict Personally in Romantic Relationship Complaint Avoidance

This study examined complaint avoidance in adult romantic relationships as a function of both exposure to family verbal aggression in childhood and taking conflict personally. Four hundred thirty-seven college students completed measures assessing their histories of family verbal aggression, complaint avoidance behaviors, and tendencies to take conflict personally. Results indicated that a history of family verbal aggression and three components of taking conflict personally, namely positive relational effects, negative relational effects, and like/dislike valence, were negatively associated with complaint avoidance. In addition, a history of family verbal aggression was positively associated with positive relational effects, negative relational effects, and like/dislike valence. The relationship between a history of family verbal aggression and complaint avoidance, however, was not mediated by taking conflict personally.     

Protecting the Ladies: Benevolent Sexism,Heteronormativity, and Partisanship in Online Discussions of Gender-Neutral Bathrooms

The recent adoption of bathroom bills restricting trans* people’s access to public bathrooms of their choice in the United States has elicited a vigorous public debate invoking benevolent sexism, heteronormativity, and partisanship. This analysis includes 9,764 online comments posted on the 13 most-shared articles or blog posts about trans* bathroom accommodation from September 2015 to September 2016. The common themes in such discussions were arguments promoting benevolent sexism, including that women and girls need protection by men and from men and that sex differences are natural. Results showed that support for trans* access to public bathrooms was most prevalent in discussions on left-leaning sites, whereas opposition was most prevalent in discussions on right-leaning sites. Most, but not all, benevolent-sexism themes were prevalent in comments on right-leaning sites. The results are discussed in the context of their theoretical implications for the literature of benevolent sexism and heteronormativity.     

Does regulation induce homogenisation? An analysis of three voucher programmes in the United States

We examine whether voucher programme regulation reduces private school specialisation in the US. We employ school-and-year fixed-effects regression and examine individual private schools in Washington, DC, Indiana, and Louisiana as they transition into voucher programme environments. We leverage the Private School Universe Survey to observe how schools self-identify before and after switching into voucher environments. We find that upon switching into school voucher environments, private schools in all 3 locations are more likely to identify as less specialised than they were prior to entering the programmes. We find suggestive evidence that the homogenising effects may be stronger in more heavily regulated voucher programme environments, and that those schools in more lightly regulated environments are more likely to continue highlighting their specialised approach to education. These findings are examined within an institutional theory framework to understand the potential homogenising effect of regulations on the diversity of the private school market.     

GCAT-SEEKquence: genome consortium for active teaching of undergraduates through increased faculty access to next-generation sequencing data

To transform undergraduate biology education, faculty need to provide opportunities for students to engage in the process of science. The rise of research approaches using next-generation (NextGen) sequencing has been impressive, but incorporation of such approaches into the undergraduate curriculum remains a major challenge. In this paper, we report proceedings of a National Science Foundation-funded workshop held July 11-14, 2011, at Juniata College. The purpose of the workshop was to develop a regional research coordination network for undergraduate biology education (RCN/UBE). The network is collaborating with a genome-sequencing core facility located at Pennsylvania State University (University Park) to enable undergraduate students and faculty at small colleges to access state-of-the-art sequencing technology. We aim to create a database of references, protocols, and raw data related to NextGen sequencing, and to find innovative ways to reduce costs related to sequencing and bioinformatics analysis. It was agreed that our regional network for NextGen sequencing could operate more effectively if it were partnered with the Genome Consortium for Active Teaching (GCAT) as a new arm of that consortium, entitled GCAT-SEEK(quence). This step would also permit the approach to be replicated elsewhere.