Developing Culturally Competent Preservice Teachers

An unfortunate, yet persistent, truth in U.S. public schools is the large achievement gap existing between children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and their White, middle-class counterparts. The potential for cultural dissonance between contemporary teachers and their students necessitates that educators must persistently seek culturally responsive practices. Much has been written regarding strategies for culturally responsive pedagogy; therefore, this article moves beyond a review of culturally responsive pedagogy. Rather than providing teacher candidates with more suggestions for culturally responsive teaching activities, the authors provide teacher educators with specific resources for facilitating the development of cultural competence among preservice teachers.     

The Persuasive Influence of Nollywood Film in Cultural Transmission: Negotiating Nigerian Culture in a South African Environment

The popularity and viewership of Nollywood films have expanded across African and Western cities especially those with considerable Diaspora population. This study seeks to investigate whether watching Nollywood films is likely to lead to cross-cultural transmission of Nigeria’s cultural heritage to audience members in South Africa. Data for the study were collected using observation and surveys with Likert-type scales involving participants from a South African college. Results show that watching Nollywood films was significant in increasing participants’ knowledge and appreciation of Nigerian culture. Observed patterns indicate that a small portion of participants could mimic or reproduce some common Nigerian expressions and exclamations while a negligible percentage of participants could actually speak a smattering of Igbo, one of Nigeria’s three major languages.     

The effect of acceleration signal processing for head impact numeric simulations

Brain injury research in sport employs a variety of physical models equipped with accelerometers. These acceleration signals are commonly processed using filters. The purpose of this research was to determine the effect of applying filters with different cutoff frequencies to the acceleration signals used as input for finite element modeling of the brain. Signals were generated from reconstructions of concussion events from American football and ice hockey in the laboratory using a Hybrid III headform. The resulting acceleration signals were used as input for the University College Dublin Brain Trauma Model after being processed with filters. The results indicated that using a filter with a cutoff of 300 Hz or higher had little effect on the resulting strain measures. In some cases there was some effect of the filters on the peak linear (8–30g) and rotational measures (1000–4000 rad/s²), but little effect on the finite element strain result (approximately 2–6 %). The short duration and high magnitude accelerations, such as the puck impact, were most affected by the cutoff frequency of different filters.     

Validity and Reliability of Three Self-Report Instruments for Assessing Attainment of Physical Activity Guidelines in University Students

The purpose of this study was to compare the validity and reliability of three short physical activity self-report instruments to determine their potential for use with university student populations. The participants (N = 155; 44.5% male; 22.9 ± 5.13 years) wore an accelerometer for 9 consecutive days and completed a single-item measure, the a brief two item measure and the International Physical Activity Questionnaire—Short Form questionnaires on day 1 and 9. Correlations between self-reported and accelerometer derived moderate-to-vigorous physical activity levels were moderate for the International Physical Activity Questionnaire—Short Form, while poor for the single-item measure and the a brief two item measure. The agreement level was high with the International Physical Activity Questionnaire—Short Form (77.4%) and moderate for both the single-item measure (45.2 %) and a brief two item measure (44.5 %). The intraclass correlations between the two administrations were moderate to strong across all measures (0.52–0.70) in 133 participants. The International Physical Activity Questionnaire—Short Form is the most suitable of these three self-report instruments for use with this population due to higher correlations and levels of agreement with accelerometry.     

Psychometric Properties of a Parental Questionnaire for Assessing Correlates of Toddlers’ Physical Activity and Sedentary Behavior

This study examined the psychometric properties of a questionnaire developed with the guidance of the socialization model of child behaviour to understand modifiable correlates of toddlers’ physical activity and sedentary behaviour. Findings are based on 118 parents (33.7 ± 4.9 years; 86% female) of toddlers (19.3 ± 2.7 months; 48% female) from Edmonton, Canada in The Parents’ Role in Establishing healthy Physical activity and Sedentary behaviour habits study (PREPS). The PREPS questionnaire encompassed 21 variables across the constructs of the socialization model of child behaviour. Of the nine variables assessed for internal consistency reliability, eight had good (α ≥ 0.70) reliability. Of the 15 continuous variables assessed for 1-week test–retest reliability, 10 had moderate (intra-class correlation = 0.50–0.74) and 5 had good (intra-class correlation ≥ 0.75) reliability. Of the six categorical variables assessed for 1-week test–retest reliability, two had fair (К = 0.21–0.40), one had moderate (К = 0.41–0.60), one had substantial (К = 0.61–0.80), and two had almost perfect (К = 0.81–1.00) reliability. Of the 12 sedentary behaviour variables assessed for convergent validity, 7 were significantly correlated with children’s screen time, of which three were small (r ≤ 0.29), two were medium (r = 0.30–0.49), and two were large (r ≥ 0.50) effect sizes.