Stress and cognitive functioning in sport

This paper considers the relationship between stress and cognitive functioning and discusses some of the concepts and methods that may be adopted to examine the relationship between stress and sports performance. It considers only that literature that may be relevant to, or furthers, the understanding of sports performance under competitive stress. One of the most popular approaches has been to explain the relationship in terms of the unidimensional inverted-U hypothesis. The validity of this approach to explaining sports performances in specific situations is discussed and it is generally concluded that the inverted-U hypothesis is too vague and simplistic. The discussion considers multidimensional approaches and discusses the suitability and implications of some more recent and more complex models of stress and performance which are now available in the psychological literature. It is concluded that the relationship between stress and sports performance is an extremely complex one and involves the interaction between the nature of the stressor, the cognitive demands of the task being performed and the psychological characteristics of the individuals performing it.     

Academic Self‐Perceptions,Effort, and Strategy Use in Students with Learning Disabilities: Changes Over Time

This study investigated changes in teachers' and students' perceptions of students' effort, strategy use, and academic difficulties when strategy instruction was infused into the classroom curriculum. The sample consisted of 201 students with learning disabilities, 210 average achievers, and 57 teachers from Grades 4–9 in two urban and suburban communities. After six months of classroom‐based strategy instruction, students with learning disabilities reported more consistent use of strategies with their schoolwork and perceived themselves as struggling less in reading, writing, and spelling. Teachers perceived the students with learning disabilities as more strategic and as applying more effort to their schoolwork. Teachers also perceived their students as showing significant improvements in spelling, regardless of whether they had learning disabilities. These findings extended the results of previous investigations and indicated the small, positive impact of classroom‐based strategy instruction. Further investigations are critical to evaluate the generalizability of these findings.     

Continuities and Discontinuities in Children and Scholarship

This article introduces a collection of essays on continuity and discontinuity in cognitive development. In his lead essay, J. Kagan (2008) argues that limitations in past research (e.g., on number concepts, physical solidarity, and object permanence) render conclusions about continuity premature. Commentaries respectively (1) argue that longitudinal contexts are essential for interpreting developmental data, (2) illustrate the value of converging measures, (3) identify qualitative change via dynamical systems theory, (4) redirect the focus from states to process, and (5) review epistemological premises of alternative research traditions. Following an overview of the essays, this introductory article discusses how the search for developmental structures, continuity, and process differs between mechanistic‐contextualist and organismic‐contextualist metatheoretical frameworks, and closes by highlighting continuities in Kagan’s scholarship over the past half century.