A Sport Education Fitness Season’s Impact on Students’ Fitness Levels,Knowledge, and In-Class Physical Activity

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which a sport education season of fitness could provide students with recommended levels of in-class moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) while also increasing students’ fitness knowledge and fitness achievement. Method: One hundred and sixty-six 5th-grade students (76 boys, 90 girls) participated in a 20-lesson season called “CrossFit Challenge” during a 4-week period. The Progressive Aerobic Cardiovascular Endurance Run, push-ups, and curl-ups tests of the FITNESSGRAM® were used to assess fitness at pretest and posttest, while fitness knowledge was assessed through a validated, grade-appropriate test of health-related fitness knowledge (HRF). Physical activity was measured with Actigraph GT3X triaxial accelerometers. Results: Results indicated a significant time effect for all fitness tests and the knowledge test. Across the entire season, the students spent an average of 54.5% of lesson time engaged in MVPA, irrespective of the type of lesson (instruction, free practice, or competition). Conclusions: The results suggest that configuring the key principles of sport education within a unit of fitness is an efficient model for providing students with the opportunity to improve fitness skill and HRF knowledge while attaining recommended levels of MVPA.     

Promoting literacy in a digital age: approaches to training for information literacy

Information literacy, and other similar ‘literacies’, such as digital literacy, mediacy, and informacy, are concepts relating to knowledge, skills, and attitudes, at various levels, in dealing with information in varied formats and diverse situations. The breadth of scope of these concepts implies that training must be equally broad, varied, and context-sensitive. This is exemplified by two case studies of information and digital literacy training. The first is a training programme in information literacy for the scientific staff of a multinational pharmaceutical research organization. The second is a summer school dealing with digital literacy, primarily for information professionals from countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union.     

Using video analysis to support prospective K-8 teachers’ noticing of students’ multiple mathematical knowledge bases

As part of a larger research project aimed at transforming preK-8 mathematics teacher preparation, the purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which prospective teachers notice children’s competencies related to children’s mathematical thinking, and children’s community, cultural, and linguistic funds of knowledge or what we refer to as children’s multiple mathematical knowledge bases. Teachers’ noticing supports students’ learning in deep and meaningful ways. Researchers designed and enacted a video analysis activity with prospective teachers in their mathematics methods course. The activity served as a decomposition of practice in order to support prospective teachers in engaging in an approximation of the practice of noticing. Our findings showed that prospective teachers evidenced noticing of mathematics teaching and learning as early as the mathematics methods course. We also found that the prompts and structure of the activity supported prospective teachers by increasing their depth of noticing and their foci in noticing, moving from attending primarily to teacher moves (and merely describing what they saw) to becoming aware of significant interactions (and interpreting effects of these interactions on learning). Implications for teacher educators interested in designing and enacting activities to support noticing are discussed.     

APPLICATIONS OF TECHNOLOGY IN COMMUNITY COLLEGES

This article discusses community college involvement in a key welfare-to-work training program, the Jobs Opportunities and Basic Skills Training Program (JOBS), as a mirror to reflect on the larger issue of how federal and state workforce policy impacts publicly-controlled institutions of higher education. A qualitative assessment of JOBS programs at community colleges framed discussion regarding the challenges community colleges face as they attempt to preserve these programs within an era of devolved responsibility for welfare-to-work funding from the federal government to the states.     

Revisiting print exposure: exploring differential links to vocabulary,comprehension and reading rate

Undergraduates (N=171) completed a revised version of the Author Recognition Test ( Stanovich & West, 1989 ). The resulting print exposure scores were divided into two dimensions: personal reading experience (primary print knowledge – PPK) and secondary print knowledge (SPK). Both PPK and SPK were correlated with print exposure, but not with each other. PPK correlated more strongly with reading‐related variables (vocabulary, comprehension and reading rate) than did SPK. Of particular importance, PPK accounted for variance in all three criterion variables after the effects of SPK had been factored out. Thus, these data support the notion that it is the act of reading over and above memory for reading‐related information that furthers the development of linguistic skill.     

Does higher education promote independent learning?

There is general consensus in the literature that the goal of education is to increase the students' capacity to learn, to provide them with analytic skills and to increase their ability to deal with new information and draw independent conclusions. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the extent to which higher education does promote these abilities which can be summarised as independent learning. Quantitative data from the Study Process Questionnaire (SPQ) and qualitative data (semi-structured student interviews) from a tertiary institution in Hong Kong are compared with similar findings from institutions in other parts of the world. The relationship between demographic variables and the SPQ sub-scales appears to follow a pattern consistent with results from elsewhere. As students become older they are less likely to adopt a surface approach and more likely to adopt a deep one. However, there is a decrease in the use of a deep approach from first to third year of a course, suggesting that education at this tertiary institution does not promote independent learning. Possible explanations are derived from the literature and the student interviews. Implications for the structure of tertiary education in Hong Kong are discussed.