Teaching children with autism through task variation in physical education.

The purpose of the study was to determine whether the technique of task variation (with maintenance tasks interspersed) (TV) is more effective in the acquisition of gross motor skills for students with autism than a constant task (CT) condition in a physical education setting. Subjects were 12 male students with autism, ages 11 to 15 years. The study included pretest-posttest administration of the I CAN assessment of Gross Motor Skills to assess skills such as overhand throw, kick, and vertical jump. After a 6-week treatment period, the TV condition was significantly more effective than the CT condition, at the .05 level.     

Construction and validation of a communication based emotional support scale

A review of the emotional support and social support literature indicates a paucity of instruments which directly measure the phenomena of interest. While many have utilized assessments of “strong” or “weak” links between relational partners, they have not examined the communication modalities specifically. They have also tended to view emotional support as a unilateral product of a source or receiver rather than a product of communicative interactions. In order to examine support more carefully, a unidimensional instrument was developed to measure the communication of emotional support in relationships. As tests of convergent validity, it was suggested that perceptions of emotional support will be positively correlated to perceptions of relational solidarity and relational quality. The final instrument consisted of 13 communication based items with high reliability and evidence of internal, face, and convergent validity.     

Media and Media Related

Ronald Gottesman and Harry Geduld (eds.) Guidebook to Film: An Eleven-in-One Reference (New York: Holt, Rinehart &; Winston, 1972 – ,$6.95/3.95)

C. Edward Wall (ed.) Multi Media Reviews Index: 1970 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Pierian Press, 1971 – $19.50)

Dorothy I. Weil's (ed.) The American Film Institute's Guide to College Film Courses 1971-72 (Chicago: American Library Association, 1972 – $3.50, paper)

Raymond Fielding's The Technique of Special Effects Cinematography (New York: Hastings House, 1972 – $18.50)     

Effects of Differing Prepuberty Exercise Programs on the Emotionality of Male Albino Rats

Abstract

The problem under investigation in this study was to determine if differing programs of prepuberty exercise had any effect upon the emotionality of male albino rats at puberty. The subjects were 48 male albino rats of the Sprague-Dawley strain who were subjected to a 35-day training program under conditions of sedentary existence, voluntary exercise, or forced exercise. At the end of the experimental period the animals were tested in an open field marked into 49 consecutively numbered 7 1/2-in. squares.

Emotionality in the open field was determined by two methods: (a) the total number of squares traversed by an animal in 5 min., and (b) the total number of squares traversed by an animal toward the center of the field. The relationship between exploratory behavior and emotionality is considered to be an inverse one, that is, the more exploratory the behavior, the less emotionality the animal exhibits.

The results indicated that the animals which had been subjected to the forced exercise regimen traversed significantly more squares under both testing conditions and therefore evidenced more exploratory behavior and therefore less emotionality than the animals in the voluntary exercise and sedentary groups. There were no significant differences on either measure of exploratory behavior between the voluntary exercise and sedentary groups.     

A multi-method approach to studying the relationship between character strengths and vocational interests in adolescents

The relationship between character strengths and vocational interests was tested. In an online study, 197 thirteen to eighteen year-olds completed a questionnaire measuring character strengths and a multi-method measure for interests (questionnaire, nonverbal test, and objective personality tests). The main findings were that intellectual strengths yielded primarily relations with investigative and artistic interests. Social interests demonstrated relations with strengths of transcendence and other-directed strengths and enterprising interests with leadership strengths. The implications of the findings for practice are highlighted.     

Higher Education,Ancient and Medieval

The article reviews the roles played by the Department of Education and the National Research Foundation in South Africa in defining the meaning of scholarship and in evaluating and funding it. The ideas that inform policy and practice include: the view that scholarship must serve the requirements of the national economy in becoming more globally competitive; attempts to manage and direct knowledge production; redressing apartheid’s legacies; and a positivist discourse. I argue in favour of diversity in the pursuit of knowledge and greater consistency with national historical development. The tensions between science and technology and the humanities, and between disciplinary-based and applied scholarship are also highlighted. They lie at the heart of the status of ‘other knowledges’ in relation to more ‘traditional’ scholarship. The political and practical implications of these analyses are raised for debate.     

Understanding Emotional Response Theory: The Role of Instructor Power and Justice Messages

Self‐efficacy is the belief or confidence people have in their ability to achieve their goals. This study tested a path model involving past communicative experience, situation difficulty, self‐efficacy, interpersonal communication competence, and interpersonal communication outcomes. We found that self‐efficacy mediated the effect of past experience and situation difficulty on interpersonal communication outcomes. Interpersonal communication competence directly effected rewarding, satisfying communication. The study also provided concurrent validity information on the Interpersonal Communication Competence Scale, a skills measure of competence that taps 10 dimensions of the construct.     

Requiring Participation: An Instructor Strategy to Influence Student Interest and Learning

Instructors are faced with the challenge of engaging students in the learning process. This study examined the effects of participation requirements on students' (N = 258) affective learning, interest, and cognitive learning using the Affective Learning Model and the Instructional Beliefs Model. Affective learning mediated the relationship between student participation requirements and cognitive learning, and student interest mediated the relationships between participation requirements and cognitive learning, supporting the IBM. The results provide insight into course-specific structural tactics that instructors can employ to enhance the educational experience for college students.     

A report on the current access to academic information at the University of Pretoria for visually impaired students: challenges and opportunities

This study aimed to determine what the best practice guidelines were for making academic reading material available to visually impaired students at the University of Pretoria (UP) easily and efficiently. A basic literature review of relevant research data was done to help create further context for this study. A semi-structured interview with a staff member from the Disability Unit at the UP as well as a focus group consisting of five visually impaired students who make use of the unit were used to obtain responses to the research questions. The visually impaired students felt that local publishers and UP staff needed further insight into these students’ academic needs in order to make the acquisition process for their academic material run smoother and more efficiently.     

More Effective Consolidation of Episodic Long‐Term Memory in Children Than Adults—Unrelated to Sleep

Abilities to encode and remember events in their spatiotemporal context (episodic memory) rely on brain regions that mature late during childhood and are supported by sleep. We compared the temporal dynamics of episodic memory formation and the role of sleep in this process between 62 children (8–12 years) and 57 adults (18–37 years). Subjects recalled “what–where–when” memories after a short 1‐hr retention interval or after a long 10.5‐hr interval containing either nocturnal sleep or daytime wakefulness. Although children showed diminished recall of episodes after 1 hr, possibly resulting from inferior encoding, unlike adults, they showed no further decrease in recall after 10.5 hr. In both age groups, episodic memory benefitted from sleep. However, children's more effective offline retention was unrelated to sleep.