Australian Small and Independent Publishing: The Freeth Report

This article provides a summary of and commentary on ‘A Lovely Kind of Madness: Small and Independent Publishing in Australia’, an unpublished report by Kate Freeth, commissioned by the Small Press Underground Networking Community (SPUNC), the representative body for small and independent publishers in Australia, and released in November 2007. Freeth’s 14,000 word report constitutes the most detailed and comprehensive study of Australian small and independent publishing since the second volume of Michael Denholm’s Small Press Publishing in Australia (1991) and provides much primary material for policy makers, scholars, and people working in and around the publishing industry.

Observing the coach-created motivational environment across training and competition in youth sport

Adopting an integrated achievement goal (Nicholls, J. G. (1989). The competitive ethos and democratic education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.) and self-determination theory (Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11, 227–268. doi:10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01) perspective as proffered by Duda, J. L. (2013). (The conceptual and empirical foundations of empowering coaching^TM: Setting the stage for the PAPA project. International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 11, 311–318. doi:10.1080/1612197X.2013.839414), the aim of the current study was to observe empowering and disempowering features of the multidimensional motivational coaching environment in training and competition in youth sport. Seventeen grass-roots soccer coaches were observed and rated in training and competitive settings using the multidimensional motivational climate observation system (MMCOS; Smith, N., Tessier, D., Tzioumakis, Y., Quested, E., Appleton, P., Sarrazin, P., … Duda, J. L. (2015). Development and validation of the multidimensional motivational climate observation system (MMCOS). Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 37, 4–22. doi:10.1123/jsep.2014-0059). In line with our hypotheses, coaches created different motivational environments in the two contexts. More specifically, coaches were observed to create a less empowering and more disempowering environment in competition compared to in training. The observed differences were underpinned by distinctive motivational strategies used by coaches in the two contexts. Findings have implications for the assessment of the coach-created motivational environment and the promotion of quality motivation for young athletes taking part in grass-roots-level sport.     

Assessing perceived need support and need satisfaction in physical education: adaptation and validation with English students

This study aimed to validate an English version of Basic Psychological Needs Support Questionnaire (BPNSQ) and the Basic Psychological Needs in Physical Education Scale (BPN-PE) in the physical education context. Participants included 453 students aged between 12 and 17 years. For the BPNSQ, the hypothesized three-factor solution displayed high interfactor correlations (rs > 1), and a follow-up analysis indicated that the items were represented by a single need-support factor. For the BPN-PE, hypothesized three-factor solution was supported. Both scales were found invariant across gender, and the nomological validity was also demonstrated through the associations between factors of both scales. This study provides initial support for the use of the BPN-PE to assess psychological need satisfaction within the physical education context among English-speaking adolescents. The hypothesized three-factor structure of the BPNSQ was not supported and more research is needed to evaluate the English version in the physical education context.     

Variables affecting physics achievement

Much research has focused on student views about physics concepts, with an emphasis on the identification of alternative conceptions, and how curricula and professional development may ameliorate the situation. However, there has been little work on determining the extent of, and in separating, the student and teacher/classroom level variables that may impact student physics achievement. This study examined the effect of different student and teacher/classroom level variables on student understanding of physics concepts using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), a regression based technique. The data were collected from 68 different teachers and 3,119 students who were using a reform curriculum, Active Physics. Teachers and students completed surveys asking about their beliefs, their classes and their personal characteristics. Students also completed a physics achievement test. The data show that students of teachers who used Active Physics for a greater portion of the year scored higher on the achievement test than did students of teachers who did not use the curriculum as much. Furthermore, the data show that the achievement gap was narrowed between boys and girls and between students with different attitudes toward physics. Additionally teachers who received inservice instruction on how to implement Active Physics narrowed the gap between students with different views of their classroom involvement. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 46: 961–976, 2009     

Multiplicities in Motion: A Turn to Transliteracies

ABSTRACT

In an effort to draw attention to the mobile dimensions of meaning making, this article proposes a pedagogy of transliteracies, supporting educators and learners in critically reflecting on how people, media, and things are connected across space and time. Expanding on the New London Group’s (1996) multiliteracies vision of communicative and ideological multiplicities, we articulate the importance of moving from multi- to trans- to highlight the mobile and emergent aspects of meaning making. We work through a classroom example to consider the contours of literacies and learning practices for making meaning on the move. We argue that in a mobile and digitally networked world, a pedagogy of transliteracies draws much needed attention to people and things connecting, relating, and intersecting, and also to how these connections, relations, and intersections occur in unequal ways that support some learners and disenfranchise others.     

Infantile Amnesia: Through a Glass Darkly

Memory for former preschool classmates was examined in 9-and 10-year-old children using measures of both explicit and implicit memory. Yes-no recognition of faces was at low levels but was significantly above chance. Skin conductance data showed similarly low but above-chance differentiation between classmates and controls. A median split of children based on their recognition memory scores showed that children with little evidence of explicit memory for classmates were as likely to show differential skin conductance responding to faces of former classmates as were children with higher recognition scores. Infantile amnesia, like the clinical syndrome for which it is named, may not always involve complete loss of encoded information.