Stress, Sport und Beschwerdewahrnehmung

Sport and physical activity are attributed with a positive influence on stress induced complaints due to their overall positive effect on health. The buffering effect on stress has not yet been clearly shown and the findings are inhomogeneous. The following article examines the buffering effect of sport and physical activity on different types of psychological and physical complaints. Therefore, a study was conducted questioning 453 people (M?=?53.56 years; SD?=?11.31) about chronic stress (Perceived Stress Scale), physical complaints (Gießener Beschwerdebogen) and their subjective physical activities (Energy consumption through physical activity – e.g. Soccer or Jogging) and energy consumption – daily bike and walking activity). A buffering effect on nearly all types of complaints could be shown through physical activity, but not through lifestyle activities. Physical activity acts complaint reducing on people suffering from increased stress. A more differentiated examination of the physical activity behaviour, the stress perception and the type of complaints might contribute to clearer findings.     

From policy to practice: applying educational change in Israeli schools for students at high academic risk

This short report identifies the academic and environmental experiences that support the reclaiming of students at high academic risk and describes an applicable school‐wide programme emanating from the call for educational change in Israel. The proposed structured academic programme demonstrates how schools can achieve broad student knowledge and set high performance standards while accommodating diverse student needs. As such, the programme provides school practitioners with intervention targets that promote school engagement and higher school performance. In addition, the report provides illustrative examples of the implemented programme within schools for students at high academic risk in Israel. It is argued that a movement towards an adaptive model of schooling as portrayed within the structured academic programme may prove to be effective in academically engaging students at academic risk, thus providing all students with democratic possibilities for learning and knowing.     

The efficacy of reciprocal teaching in fostering the reading literacy of students with intellectual disabilities

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of strategy instruction on the reading literacy of students with mild and moderate intellectual disability. Students aged 15–21 with intellectual disability (n=35) participated in 24 sessions of literacy strategy instruction (experimental condition) or remedial literacy‐skill acquisition‐ lessons (control condition). The main objective of strategy instruction was to foster comprehension monitoring. Through shared dialogues, students were trained to generate questions about text, to summarise what was read, to clarify difficult words and to make predictions. The strategies were taught using the reciprocal teaching method developed by Palincsar and Brown. This method involves provision of support adjusted to students’ difficulties and peer teaching of strategies. Control subjects were exposed to direct instruction of basic reading skills that were presented sequentially and practiced solitarily by the students. Opportunities were given to respond to questions and to summarise but no strategy instruction was provided to foster comprehension monitoring. Two different measures of comprehension and a measure of strategy use were administered to test for variation across different methods of instruction. Findings on all measures provide support for the claim that strategy instruction is indeed superior to traditional remedial methods of skill acquisition in fostering reading literacy comprehension. These findings challenge the common perception that literacy is an organic impossibility for people defined as intellectually disabled. Moreover, the results add to recent research in sociocognitive instruction that supports the need to modify prevailing methods of reading curriculum and suggests a reconceptualisation of the comprehension process and its instruction to students with intellectual disabilities.     

Purposeful Reflections: Scaffolding Preservice Teachers' Field Placement Observations

ABSTRACT

In this qualitative study we examine preservice teachers' abilities to connect theory and practice through the use of a collaboratively developed field observation guide, namely the “Targeted Field Observation Guide.” The goal in developing and implementing this field-based observation guide was to help preservice teachers make explicit, purposeful connections between their required, course-embedded field placements and the secondary undergraduate content area literacy courses in which they were enrolled. Forty-three preservice teachers participated in this study and were enrolled in a large public university or a small private college in the Midwestern United States. Analysis of participants' weekly written reflections shared via computer-mediated communication (Google Docs) reveals that using a field-based observation guide further supported connections and conversations with peers regarding their field reflections and observations. However, many participants' reflections still demonstrated limited connections between theory and practice.     

Instructor perspectives of multiple-choice questions in summative assessment for novice programmers

Learning to program is known to be difficult for novices. High attrition and high failure rates in foundation-level programming courses undertaken at tertiary level in Computer Science programs, are commonly reported. A common approach to evaluating novice programming ability is through a combination of formative and summative assessments, with the latter typically represented by a final examination. Preparation of such assessment is driven by instructor perceptions of student learning of programming concepts. This in turn may yield instructor perspectives of summative assessment that do not necessarily correlate with student expectations or abilities. In this article, we present results of our study around instructor perspectives of summative assessment for novice programmers. Both quantitative and qualitative data have been obtained via survey responses from programming instructors with varying teaching experience, and from novice student responses to targeted examination questions. Our findings highlight that most of the instructors believed that summative assessment is, and is meant to be, a valid measure of a student's ability to program. Most instructors further believed that Multiple-choice Questions (MCQs) provide a means of testing a low level of understanding, and a few added qualitative comments to suggest that MCQs are easy questions, and others refused to use them at all. There was no agreement around the proposition that if a question was designed to test a low level of skill, or a low level in a hierarchy of a body of knowledge, that such a question should or would be found to be easy by the student. To aid our analysis of assessment questions, we introduced four measures: Syntax Knowledge; Semantic Knowledge; Problem Solving Skill and the Level of Difficulty of the Problem. We applied these measures to selected examination questions, and have identified gaps between the instructor perspectives of what is considered to be an easy question and also in what is required to be assessed to determine whether students have achieved the goals of their course.     

Designing Science Learning in the First Years of Schooling. An intervention study with sequenced learning material on the topic of ‘floating and sinking'

Research on learning and instruction of science has shown that learning environments applied in preschool and primary school rarely makes use of structured learning materials in problem-based environments although these are decisive quality features for promoting conceptual change and scientific reasoning within early science learning. We thus developed and implemented a science learning environment for children in the first years of schooling which contains structured learning materials with the goal of supporting conceptual change concerning the understanding of the floating and sinking of objects and fostering students' scientific reasoning skills. In the present implementation study, we aim to provide a best-practice example of early science learning. The study was conducted with a sample of 15 classes of the first years of schooling and a total of 244 children. Tests were constructed to measure children's conceptual understanding before and after the implementation. Our results reveal a decrease in children's misconceptions from pretest to posttest. After the curriculum, the children were able to produce significantly more correct predictions about the sinking or floating of objects than before the curriculum and also relative to a control group. Moreover, due to the intervention, the explanations given for their predictions implied a more elaborated concept of material kinds. All in all, a well-structured curriculum promoting comparison and scientific reasoning by means of inquiry learning was shown to support children's conceptual change.     

Investigating the Use of Integrated Instructions to Reduce the Cognitive Load Associated with Doing Practical Work in Secondary School Science

This study investigated the effects of integrated illustrations on understanding instructions for practical work in science. Ninety‐six secondary school students who were unfamiliar with the target content knowledge and practical equipment took part. The students were divided into two conditions: (1) modified instructions containing integrated text and illustrations, and (2) conventional instructions containing text only. Modified instructions produced significantly higher levels of performance on task, lower time to completion and perceived cognitive load and task difficulty, higher relative efficiency score, and higher post‐test scores than the conventional instructions. When learners are inexperienced and the information is complex, the results suggest that physically integrating mutually referring sources of information reduces cognitive load, and therefore makes practical work instructions easier to understand.     

Assistance and Accountability in Externally Managed Schools: The Case of Edison Schools,Inc.

Edison Schools, Inc., is the largest and most visible among a growing number of Education Management Organizations that have entered into contracts to manage public schools, including both conventional and charter schools. Edison's approach to managing schools is comprehensive, and it distinguishes itself from most other school improvement strategies by simultaneously addressing both the resources and assistance provided to schools and the accountability systems under which school staff operate. In this article we explore the ways in which the assistance and resources provided by Edison (including diverse professional development opportunities, materials, technology, and other tools), as well as accountability mechanisms (such as monitoring and rewards), have translated into principal and teacher actions, and the factors that facilitated or constrained educators' efforts to implement the Edison design and improve teaching and learning. Drawing on data gathered from extensive interviews, observations, and document reviews collected during a four-year comprehensive study of Edison schools, we demonstrate how Edison intends to promote not only educators' capacity but also their motivation and opportunity to deliver high-quality instruction. We examine variation that occurs across schools as teachers and principals respond to these system-level efforts. In addition, we identify several important predictors of variation in implementation, including the strength of instructional leadership provided by the principal and the presence or absence of district-imposed constraints such as union contract rules.     

Sleep and Cognition in Preschool Years: Specific Links to Executive Functioning

This study investigated the prospective links between sleep in infancy and preschoolers' cognitive performance. Mothers of 65 infants completed a sleep diary when infants were aged 1 year, and children completed two subscales of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence at 4 years, indexing general cognitive ability and complex executive functioning. Consistent with hypotheses, children getting higher proportions of their sleep at night as infants were found to perform better on executive functions, but did not show better general cognition. Relations held after controlling for family socioeconomic status and prior cognitive functioning. These findings suggest that the special importance of sleep for higher order cognition, documented among adults, may appear very early in life.