Physical education at preschools: practitioners’ and children’s engagements with physical activity and health discourses

This paper focuses on one aspect of a qualitative study concerned with investigating the place and meaning of ‘physical education’ to practitioners and children at three preschools in Scotland. We examine the ways in which the participants engaged with discourses related to physical activity and health in order to construct their subjectivities. Fourteen practitioners and 70 children participated. Research methods employed were observations, interviews with adults, a group drawing and discussion activity with children, and interviews with children. Both the adults’ and children’s talk illustrated the dominance of neoliberal, healthism meanings that position individuals as responsible for their own health. While the children’s talk primarily centred on health as a corporeal notion, the practitioners tended to talk about physical activity and health in both corporeal terms and in relation to the self more holistically. The practitioners also talked about physical activity as a means of regulating children’s behaviour.     

Effective learning activities in observation taks when learning to write and read argumentative texts

On repeated occasions, observational learning has proved itself to be an effective instruction method. Experimental studies have shown to be effective for complex tasks such as reading and writing for both teachers and students as models. The problem when interpreting the results of such research is that, in observation tasks, several mental activities play a simultaneous role. In this study we therefore set out to identify the effective elements of observation tasks. We focused on two elements of the observation tasks, both aimed at stimulating monitoring activities: evaluation of the model’s performance and elaboration on this evaluation. We have also distinguished between elaboration on the observed products (the models’ written answers), and elaboration on the observed processes (the models’ verbalisations of their mental activities). The data were subjected to a LISREL analysis. First of all, it was observed that subjects who performed “evaluation” and “productelaboration” better, and “process-elaboration” more often in one lesson, also performed these activities better or more often in the subsequent lesson. Next, we observed an effect of aptitude on the learning activities: pre skill scores influence “evaluation” and “product-elaboration”. The most important finding is that “evaluation” and “product-elaboration” contribute positively to argumentative writing skills. It is discussed that these findings confirm the importance of the monitoring, evaluative and reflective activities when learning complex tasks as writing.     

Literary reading activities of good and weak students: A think aloud study

In this study we examined how good and weak students of literature interact with short literary stories. We focused on differences in the use of cognitive and affective reading activities, and in the extent to which good and weak students adapt their activities to (parts of) the story they are reading. 19 Dutch tenth-grade students from 8 classes participated in the study, of whom 10 were known to be good students of literature and 9 were known as weak literature students. Each student read five literary stories under think aloud conditions. The stories were presented segment by segment on a computer screen. Students responses were transcribed, segmented and coded. Analysis of variance was applied to the data to test the diffrences between good and weak students.     

Assessing reading skills by means of paper-and-pencil lexical decision: Issues of reliability,repetition, and word-pseudoword ratio

This study focused on the feasibility of agroup-administered paper-and-pencil lexical-decisiontest as a plausible alternative or supplementary tool for the assessment of readingskills. Lexical-decision tests and oral-readingtests were administered to 130 Dutch studentsfrom primary grades 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6. Correlations were moderate to high in low grades, butdeclined in the high grades. The reliability ofthe lexical-decision test assessed by means ofa test--retest procedure was generally good. Asecond presentation of the lexical-decisiontest caused repetition effects (i.e., betterperformance on the second test), but generallyremained within reasonable limits. The presenceof different numbers of pseudowords (25%vs. 75%) in both lexical decision and oralreading, indicated that a large number ofpseudowords made oral reading harder, butlexical decision easier. Educational andclinical implications are discussed.     

Children's Memory of an Occurrence of a Repeated Event: Effects of Age, Repetition, and Retention Interval across Three Question Types

Children's memory of the final occurrence of a repeated event was examined whereby each occurrence had the same underlying structure but included unpredictable variations in the specific instantiations of items across the series. The event was administered by the children's teachers at the kindergarten or school. The effects of repetition (single vs. repeated event), age (4–5 vs. 6–8-year-olds), retention interval (1 week vs. 6 weeks), and the frequency of specific instantiations of items were examined across 3 question types. Repetition increased the number of items recalled on a level that was common to all occurrences in response to general probes and reduced the likelihood that children would report details that did not occur in the event. However, repetition also reduced the number of correct responses about which instantiation was included in the occurrence and decreased the consistency of responses across repeated questioning. Most errors were intrusions of details from other occurrences; usually references to instantiations of items that had occurred frequently throughout the series. The younger children showed a poorer ability to discriminate between the occurrences than the older children, but age differences were less evident at the longer retention interval. The results are discussed in relation to current theories of memory and children's eyewitness testimony.     

The relationship between child sexual abuse and academic achievement in a sample of adolescent psychiatric inpatients

OBJECTIVES: To examine the relationship between sexual abuse and academic achievement in an adolescent inpatient psychiatric population. Individual factors expected to influence this relationship were measured to explore the way they each interacted with sexual abuse and its relationship to academic achievement. METHOD: Eighty-one adolescent psychiatric inpatients participated in the study (aged 12--18 years: M=16.0). Participants were administered tests of academic achievement (dependent variable) and intelligence, and completed a number of self-report measures of their experience of different types of maltreatment, their perception of the parenting they received, socio-economic status, substance abuse, and psychopathology. RESULTS: Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that intelligence was the main predictor of academic achievement (uniquely explaining 26% of the variance). A number of interaction effects were also significant indicating that intelligence, substance abuse, internalizing behavior problems, externalizing behavior problems all influenced the relationship between sexual abuse and academic achievement. DISCUSSION: Examining the impact of sexual abuse is complex because it is typically an experience embedded in a range of other risk factors, such as poverty, family dysfunction, and other types of maltreatment. This study demonstrated coexistence between sexual abuse and a number of other variables, including other maltreatment types and parental overprotection, underscoring the requirement for complex models of research that more accurately reflect the experience of abused children.     

Dealing with an aging workforce: Locating threats and opportunities in corporate media

ABSTRACT

Although workforce aging is among the major challenges facing developed countries, organizational communication about this issue has received little scholarly attention. Drawing on a content analysis of corporate media, we reconstruct how Dutch organizations (N = 50) framed older workers’ employability during the period 2006–2013 in diagnostic (problem-definitions) and prognostic (solution-definitions) terms, and we trace the influence of corporate media types and organizational characteristics on these frames. Results reveal that organizations frequently highlight problems on the macrolevel (societal) and the mesolevel (organizational), while most solutions are located on the microlevel (individual). Using multilevel modelling, we found support for the expectation that the issue is more strongly problematized in internal compared to external corporate media, and that problems related to individual older employees are most pronounced in public sector organizations’ communication. Our findings highlight diverse ways in which organizations can communicatively address factors that hamper older workers’ employability.     

Text writing from a Vygotskyan perspective: A sign-mediated operation

Many studies have analysed the text written at school by pupils as a final product. Fewer are those which are based on the production process itself. What happened in the student’s mind between the time of reading the subject to do and that of writing the final text? There is an intermediate step between these two moments: the rough copy. During a research on rough copys of 15 to 16 years old, submitted to the production of an historical text, we could establish two kinds of rough:

- some of them present a written structure similar to the final work (complete sentences, linear structure). In this case, the rough copy is a prototype of the final version, including deletions and mistakes.

- the other present a totaly different structure: predicative language, structures like lists, tables or arborescent structures, utilization of non conventional signs thought by the pupil. Some of these caracteristices have been attribued to the inner language by Vygotsky. The syntatical similarity of inner speech and writing on rough copy come from the identical functions of these two languages, which are speech in and for one self.

     

Pupils’ (II ‐ 12 year olds) conceptions of combustion

This study relates to the teaching of combustion in the first year of French secondary education (11‐12 years of age). The area of particular interest was to investigate to what extent a study of combustion makes it possible to introduce concepts relative to chemical reactions.

Data were collected before teaching and during teaching sessions by means of written replies to questionnaires, interviews, and tape‐recording of the sessions. Over 400 pupils were questioned. The results show that the observations made by the students lead them to interpretations which are far removed from concepts of a chemical reaction between a combustible and oxygen. The modification of properties of an object during a combustion results from separate transformations of each of the substances composing the object. Permanent nature of some substances is asserted, made good by the conservation of some properties (colour, smell, for example).

These results have immediate pedagogical implications and indicate the necessity of redefining the objectives of such teaching.