Transition from school to industry and further education

Since the war a good deal of attention has been focussed in Great Britain on the problem of transition from school to industry and further education. The writer has found himself in recent years in the position of having to conduct study groups and advise on practical approaches to these transition problems. This paper is designed to report on a number of researches and experiments which have been conducted in this field in this country. It is not meant to be exhaustive nor are the events necessarily recorded chronologically. They are reported to show the development of a policy and at the same time the writer wishes to pay tribute to a great deal of work which has been done especially in the field of social adjustment to industry and commerce.

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Der Übergang von der Schule zur Industrie und zur Weiterbildung

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Passage de L'ecole a L'industrie et a L'education Complementaire

     

Modelling age and secular differences in fitness between basketball players

Concerns about the value of physical testing and apparently declining test performance in junior basketball players prompted this retrospective study of trends in anthropometric and fitness test scores related to recruitment age and recruitment year. The participants were 1011 females and 1087 males entering Basketball Australia's State and National programmes (1862 and 236 players, respectively). Players were tested on 2.6 +/- 2.0 (mean +/- s) occasions over 0.8 +/- 1.0 year. Test scores were adjusted to recruitment age (14-19 years) and recruitment year (1996-2003) using mixed modelling. Effects were estimated by log transformation and expressed as standardized (Cohen) differences in means. National players scored more favourably than State players on all tests, with the differences being generally small (standardized differences, 0.2-0.6) or moderate (0.6-1.2). On all tests, males scored more favourably than females, with large standardized differences (>1.2). Athletes entering at age 16 performed at least moderately better than athletes entering at age 14 on most tests (standardized differences, 0.7-2.1), but test scores often plateaued or began to deteriorate at around 17 years. Some fitness scores deteriorated over the 8-year period, most notably a moderate increase in sprint time and moderate (National male) to large (National female) declines in shuttle run performance. Variation in test scores between National players was generally less than that between State players (ratio of standard deviations, 0.83-1.18). More favourable means and lower variability in athletes of a higher standard highlight the potential utility of these tests in junior basketball programmes, although secular declines should be a major concern of Australian basketball coaches.     

Longitudinal patterns of stability and change in coping across three competitions: a latent class growth analysis

An unresolved issue in the coping literature concerns the traitlike versus statelike nature of coping utilization. The aim of this study was to illustrate the benefits of moving beyond the sole reliance on mean-level and rank-order analyses in order to identify heterogeneous patterns of longitudinal stability and change in coping utilization. More specifically, this study hypothesized that not all athletes would change their coping across competitions, nor do all "changers" change in a similar manner. Male soccer players (N = 107) completed a self-reported coping measure after three competitions held over a 6-month period. Results of latent class growth modeling showed three distinct trajectories for each coping dimension (i.e., task, distraction, and disengagement coping), not only indicating linear or quadratic change, but also stability in longitudinal coping utilization. These results highlight the need to account for the multinomial heterogeneity in longitudinal coping utilization and to identify the correlates associated with distinct trajectories of change and stability of coping across competitions.