Functional Assessment to Predict Capacity for Work in a Population of School‐leavers with Disabilities

This study reports on an assessment system for school‐leavers with disabilities to identify their capacity for work and the type of transition‐to‐work programme best suited to each person. Participants were 1,556 high school students in four cohorts who left school between 1999 and 2002. Each school‐leaver was assessed by rehabilitation counsellors for functional ability and capacity for work. In a supplementary study, the 2002 cohort was assessed by special transition teachers using a short screening tool. The results demonstrate that there is a predictable hierarchy of functional acquisition among school‐leavers with disabilities and that the single best predictor of future capacity for work and need for transition‐to‐work programmes among this group of young people is the capacity to manage activities of daily living. The results also demonstrate that a short screen used by teachers, together with a behavioural assessment, is sufficient to stream school‐leavers with a disability into a range of transition‐to‐work programmes.     

Electronic publishing: fears,myths, and scenarios

Offers a fresh perspective on recent and future technological developments in publishing, from an information scientist’s viewpoint.     

Preparing novice teachers to develop basic reading and spelling skills in children

This study examined the word-structure knowledge of novice teachers and the progress of children tutored by a subgroup of the teachers. Teachers’ word-structure knowledge was assessed using three tasks: graphophonemic segmentation, classification of pseudowords by syllable type, and classification of real words as phonetically regular or irregular. Tutored children were assessed on several measures of basic reading and spelling skills. Novice teachers who received word-structure instruction outperformed a comparison group of teachers in word-structure knowledge at post-test. Tutored children improved significantly from pre-test to post-test on all assessments. Teachers’ post-test knowledge on the graphophonemic segmentation and irregular words tasks correlated significantly with tutored children’s progress in decoding phonetically regular words; error analyses indicated links between teachers’ patterns of word-structure knowledge and children’s patterns of decoding progress. The study suggests that word-structure knowledge is important to effective teaching of word decoding and underscores the need to include this information in teacher preparation.     

User experience methodology: from the physical to the emotional

• Understanding users is vital to any interface design.
• People vary enormously – this affects not only the design but also the ways that we assess interface design success.
• To fully understand users we need to pair quantitative data with qualitative research.

     

Comparative efficacy of active recovery and cold water immersion as post-match recovery interventions in elite youth soccer

ABSTRACT

The current study compared cold-water immersion (CWI) and active recovery (AR) to static stretching (SS) on muscle recovery post-competitive soccer matches in elite youth players (n = 15). In a controlled crossover design, participants played a total of nine competitive soccer games, comprising three 80 minute games for each intervention (SS, CWI and AR). Muscle oedema, creatine kinase (CK), countermovement jump performance (CMJA) and perceived muscle soreness (PMS) were assessed pre-, immediately post-, and 48 hours post-match and compared across time-intervals and between interventions. Following SS, all markers of muscle damage remained significantly elevated (P < 0.05) compared to baseline at 48 hours post-match. Following AR and CWI, CMJA returned to baseline at 48 hours post-match, whilst CK returned to baseline following CWI at 48 hours post-match only. Analysis between recovery interventions revealed a significant improvement in PMS (P < 0.05) at 48 hours post-match when comparing AR and CWI to SS, with no significant differences between AR and CWI observed (P > 0.05). Analysis of %change for CK and CMJA revealed significant improvements for AR and CWI compared to SS. The present study indicated both AR and CWI are beneficial recovery interventions for elite young soccer players following competitive soccer matches, of which were superior to SS.