Coaching under pressure: a study of Olympic coaches

The Olympic environment has been identified as particularly stressful and unlike any other in terms of the media attention and focus placed on the competition. While the potential negative consequences of stress for coaches and their athletes have been explored, relatively little is known about the factors underpinning successful Olympic coaching performance. We explored elite coaches' perceptions of the factors that enable them to coach in a stressful Olympic environment. Eight coaches from one of Great Britain's most successful Olympic teams (i.e. consistent medal winners in the previous three Olympics) were interviewed. Inductive content analysis indicated that psychological attributes (e.g. emotional control), preparation (e.g. strategic approach), and coping at the event (e.g. team support) were factors that coaches perceived as important for successful Olympic coaching. In addition, coaches offered specific suggestions for training and development. Key themes included coach interaction (e.g. mentoring, formalizing contact) and simulating Olympic pressure. These findings offer suggestions for the education of developing coaches on the pathway to elite sports coaching.     

Coping Strategies of Caribbean “Problem Students”

Abstract   The coping strategies of middle adolescents (14–16 years) generate interest amongst educators, parents, school psychologists and school counsellors. This study, using a phenomenological approach, examined the coping strategies of ‘problem’ adolescents in the Caribbean in regard to their interactions with peers and teachers. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of twenty middle adolescents in Barbados. The adolescents’ efforts to manage problems in the school environment suggested that they actively sought to prevent problems from progressing to a maladaptive level. An apparent sequence of coping behaviours emerged from the qualitative data analysis. The sequence involves a dynamic process of seven cognitive decision-making and behavioural steps that the adolescents engaged in, in their quest to manage and effectively cope with daily problems. Based on the findings, recommendations are presented for working with adolescents who demonstrate problem behaviours within the school environment.     

Analysis of named entity recognition and linking for tweets

Applying natural language processing for mining and intelligent information access to tweets (a form of microblog) is a challenging, emerging research area. Unlike carefully authored news text and other longer content, tweets pose a number of new challenges, due to their short, noisy, context-dependent, and dynamic nature. Information extraction from tweets is typically performed in a pipeline, comprising consecutive stages of language identification, tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition and entity disambiguation (e.g. with respect to DBpedia). In this work, we describe a new Twitter entity disambiguation dataset, and conduct an empirical analysis of named entity recognition and disambiguation, investigating how robust a number of state-of-the-art systems are on such noisy texts, what the main sources of error are, and which problems should be further investigated to improve the state of the art.     

Taking on Bourdieu’s ‘destiny effect’: theorising the development and sustainability of a socially just second-chance schooling initiative using a Bourdieusian framework

This article aims to theorise a storyline account of a collaborative three-year action research project into schooling re-engagement using a Bourdieusian framework. In the article we discuss how we (two teachers and a social worker) developed an alternative senior secondary school that re-engaged a sizable minority of marginalised young people back into formalised learning and consider how this school became a significant and sustainable educational alternative. Our work during this developmental period drew us into community-based activism enacting socially just curricular and pedagogical experiments. Through networked political action for schooling justice in concert with critical friends (our university partners), the marginalised young people we worked with and supportive regional youth stakeholders, we reconstructed our professional habitus as professionals into a more enabling rendering and strived to proffer through our relational, pedagogical and curricular work with students more of a transformative habitus. Our curricular and activist work inside the community extended the field of schooling relations into a more socially just orientation. This more enabling community field merged with our schooling field and enabled us to source political capital engendering secure, recurrent school funding and a purpose-built schooling facility. We claim that the market logics of schooling significantly influenced our beginning enrolment growth trajectory, and discuss how these logics compromised our ability to break through Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘destiny effect’. Since its inception in 2003, the Second Chance Community College has offered a comprehensive senior secondary schooling programme for more than 1000 young people. Throughout its 12-year history, the majority of students have gone on to secure work, apprenticeships and tertiary study but only 10% of students have successfully completed their final year of schooling.     

To be or not to be an excellent football referee: different experts’ viewpoints

Football is central to the lives of countless individuals around the globe. While most of the attention of those passionate about the sport is focused on the players, football referees are often just as important in shaping the outcome of the games. Therefore, research is increasingly examining the role of referees. Even so, our understanding of the factors that create an excellent football referee is still scarce.

Based on our analysis of the opinions of 24 football experts, we demonstrate the multidimensionality of excellence in the performance of football referees. From a Categorical Principal Components Analysis (CatPCA), we were able to pinpoint that football referee excellence is shaped by three distinct dimensions: individual preparation, game preparation and game management. Additionally, we were able to see if these perceptions were different from individuals “within” the game versus those “outside” the game. Namely, we used CatPCA to graphically display the main correlations between the latent dimensions of football refereeing performance and the “inside” and “outside” perspective of the game. The findings of our work contribute towards the knowledge of the factors that shape football referee excellence, while also highlighting areas in need of additional research attention.     

The relationship between child care subsidies and children's cognitive development

Child care subsidies help low-income families pay for child care while parents work or study. Few studies have examined the effects of child care subsidy use on child development, and no studies have done so controlling for prior cognitive skills. We use rich, longitudinal data from the ECLS-B data set to estimate the relationship between child care subsidy use and school readiness, using value-added regression models as well as parametric and non-parametric models with propensity score matching. Compared to a diverse group of subsidy non-recipients in various types of non-parental care as well as parental care only, we find that child care subsidy use during preschool is negatively associated with children's math skills at kindergarten entry. However, sensitivity analysis suggests that these findings could be easily overturned if unobserved factors affect selection into subsidy receipt.     

A brief history of family life education in Romania

Starting from the state of conceptual diversity, semantic ambiguity, and poor connection of family life education practices to current policies and theoretical models in Romania, our study aims at understanding the underlying meanings of these issues by recourse to the history of approaches in the field. To this purpose, we carried out a qualitative historical research, based on the thematic analysis of a set of educational works produced between the sixteenth century, when the first Romanian texts were written, and the present time. Primary historical sources are supplemented with reliable secondary sources, while the criteria used for the selection of texts were their relevance to family life education (FLE), and the notoriety of the works in the corresponding historical periods. As in western countries, the concept of FLE was coined in Romania at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the family education discourse was outlined, but the roots of the field can be traced even in the first printed texts. Although marked by strong moral and religious emphases during pre-modernity, FLE has entered the slow process of secularisation and evolved from the perspective of political, social, and moral reconstruction goals of modern Romania. However, FLE’s goals and contents were redefined during Communism, and the discrepancies between discourses, practices, and realities compromised the functionality of the pedagogical model promoted at the time. A unitary definition of FLE in relation to Romanian contemporary families’ needs requires reconciliation with historical, cultural, and educational premises, as well as a careful contextualisation of western models and practices.