Does Displaying the Class Results Affect Student Discussion during Peer Instruction?

The use of personal response systems, or clickers, is increasingly common in college classrooms. Although clickers can increase student engagement and discussion, their benefits also can be overstated. A common practice is to ask the class a question, display the responses, allow the students to discuss the question, and then collect the responses a second time. In an introductory biology course, we asked whether showing students the class responses to a question biased their second response. Some sections of the course displayed a bar graph of the student responses and others served as a control group in which discussion occurred without seeing the most common answer chosen by the class. If students saw the bar graph, they were 30% more likely to switch from a less common to the most common response. This trend was more pronounced in true/false questions (38%) than multiple-choice questions (28%). These results suggest that observing the most common response can bias a student''s second vote on a question and may be misinterpreted as an increase in performance due to student discussion alone.     

When empathy hurts: Modelling university students’ word of mouth behaviour in public vs. private universities in Syria

This study examines and compares word of mouth (WOM) behaviour among university students in Syria. To date, little is known about this important phenomenon which is surprising given the deregulated education market in Syria that allows for private universities to compete for students alongside public universities. Using a mixed methods research design and structural equation modelling, our results show faculty individualised attention and student satisfaction were found to be positively related to university image. Further, student satisfaction and university image were found to be direct sources of students’ positive WOM behaviour. We found a moderating effect of university ownership type on university image. Interestingly, we identified six themes showing how support staff empathy could be seen as a source of low student satisfaction. These were defined as deception/credibility/soft‐soapers/suspiciousness: when support staff coax something out of students; confusion/role conflict: resulting from the diverse roles played by support staff while interacting with students; unfairness: when a student notices discrimination in the level of empathy between their peers; privacy: when support staff empathy can be perceived as a kind of intrusion; self‐congratulatory: when a support staff member shows off or praises their empathy; and support staff/student ratio: when this ratio is seen to be small, the empathy effect reverses.     

Test-retest reliability of a battery of field-based health-related fitness measures for adolescents

The main aim of this study was to determine the test-retest reliability of existing tests of health-related fitness. Participants (mean age 14.8 years, s?=?0.4) were 42 boys and 26 girls who completed the study assessments on two occasions separated by one week. The following tests were conducted: bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) to calculate percent body fat, leg dynamometer, 90° push-up, 7-stage sit-up, and wall squat tests. Intra-class correlation (ICC), paired samples t-tests, and typical error expressed as a coefficient of variation were calculated. The mean percent body fat intra-class correlation coefficient was similar for boys (ICC?=?0.95) and girls (ICC?=?0.93), but the mean coefficient of variation was considerably higher for boys than girls (22.2% vs. 12.2%). The boys' coefficients of variation for the tests of muscular fitness ranged from 9.0% for the leg dynamometer test to 26.5% for the timed wall squat test. The girls' coefficients of variation ranged from 17.1% for the sit-up test to 21.4% for the push-up test. Although the BIA machine produced reliable estimates of percent body fat, the tests of muscular fitness resulted in high systematic error, suggesting that these measures may require an extensive familiarization phase before the results can be considered reliable.     

Perfectionism and perceptions of parenting styles in male youth soccer

Although perfectionist orientations have been linked to a variety of cognitive, affective, and behavioral correlates in youth sport, little is known about antecedent factors that may influence adolescent athletes' perfectionist orientations. The purpose of this study was to determine whether perceptions of parenting styles differ as a function of adolescent athletes' perfectionist orientations. A total of 194 male youth soccer players (M age = 13.64 years; SD = 1.51; range, 10.67-16.25 years) completed measures of their perfectionist orientations in sport and of their perceptions of maternal and paternal parenting styles. Scores from the parenting style measure were calculated such that higher scores were reflective of higher parental authoritativeness (as perceived by the athletes). Cluster analyses conducted on perfectionism responses produced independent clusters of unhealthy perfectionists, healthy perfectionists, and nonperfectionists. MANOVA results revealed that both healthy- and nonperfectionists had significantly higher perceptions of maternal and paternal authoritativeness than unhealthy perfectionists (ps < .005). Results indicate that exposure to heightened authoritative parenting may play a role in developing healthy perfectionist orientations (or decrease the likelihood of developing unhealthy perfectionist orientations) in youth sport.     

Conceptions of mathematics and how it is learned: The perspectives of students entering university

This paper reports results from an investigation to identify the conceptions of mathematics held by beginning university students and their approaches to the study of mathematics. Phenomenographic techniques were used to analyze responses to a questionnaire administered to approximately 300 students. An analysis of the results identified a structural relationship between students' conceptions of mathematics and their approaches to learning it, with the majority of students viewing mathematics as a necessary set of rules and procedures to be learned by rote. The results of this research have implications for the ways in which teaching and learning are constituted within universities.