The relationships between impact location and post-impact ball speed,bat torsion,and ball direction in cricket batting

Three-dimensional kinematic data of bat and ball were recorded for 239 individual shots performed by twenty batsmen ranging from club to international standard. The impact location of the ball on the bat face was determined and assessed against the resultant instantaneous post-impact ball speed and measures of post-impact bat torsion and ball direction. Significant negative linear relationships were found between post-impact ball speed and the absolute distance of impact from the midline medio-laterally and sweetspot longitudinally. Significant cubic relationships were found between the distance of impact from the midline of the bat medio-laterally and both a measure of bat torsion and the post-impact ball direction. A “sweet region” on the bat face was identified whereby impacts within 2 cm of the sweetspot in the medio-lateral direction, and 4.5 cm in the longitudinal direction, caused reductions in ball speed of less than 6% from the optimal value, and deviations in ball direction of less than 10° from the intended target. This study provides a greater understanding of the margin for error afforded to batsmen, allowing researchers to assess shot success in more detail, and highlights the importance of players generating consistently central impact locations when hitting for optimal performance.     

Early Language Experience in a Tseltal Mayan Village

Daylong at-home audio recordings from 10 Tseltal Mayan children (0;2–3;0; Southern Mexico) were analyzed for how often children engaged in verbal interaction with others and whether their speech environment changed with age, time of day, household size, and number of speakers present. Children were infrequently directly spoken to, with most directed speech coming from adults, and no increase with age. Most directed speech came in the mornings, and interactional peaks contained nearly four times the baseline rate of directed speech. Coarse indicators of children’s language development (babbling, first words, first word combinations) suggest that Tseltal children manage to extract the linguistic information they need despite minimal directed speech. Multiple proposals for how they might do so are discussed.     

The structure of relationally indexed titles and abstracts

Farradane's system of relational indexing has been used to index abstracts in several, mainly scientific subject areas, and provides two-dimensional displays of concepts and explicit relations. Ten of these collections have been examined to compare (a) the use of relations, (b) the use of concept types, (c) the cross sections (or shape) of abstracts, and (d) the properties of “nodes”. Whilst differences between the collections were noted in several instances, there were no obvious correlations between these differences. However, some points arose which could warrant more detailed study with larger collections.     

Development and Evaluation of a Three-Tier Diagnostic Test to Assess Undergraduate Primary Teachers’ Understanding of Ecological Footprint

Research in Science Education - This study focused on the development and validation of a three-tier multiple-choice diagnostic instrument about the ecological footprint. Each question in the...     

Junin Quechua Children's Understanding of Mind

2 tasks that examine the child's understanding of false belief, representational change, and the appearance-reality distinction were conducted among 34 4- to 8-year-old Junin Quechua children in Peru. A majority of children demonstrated an understanding of the appearance-reality distinction, though there was a clear improvement with age. Both younger and older children, however, performed poorly on questions that tested their understanding of representational change and false belief. These results raise questions as to whether or not thinking about thought and its relation to action develops in a similar manner in all cultures. If the Junin Quechua children's understanding of the appearance-reality distinction is grounded in the same representational ability that is necessary to understand one's own and another's misrepresentation of reality, then we must look for other factors that prevent them from performing correctly on tasks that test their understanding of false belief and representational change.     

An education for sustainable development self-efficacy scale for primary pre-service teachers: construction and validation

A scale was developed to assess primary school Teachers’ Self-Efficacy on Education for Sustainable Development (TSESESD). It includes four domains of competences: values and ethics, systems thinking, emotions and feelings, and actions. The scale development is consistent with key principles of educational and social psychology research. Nine hundred twenty-four (924) primary education student teachers and 88 in-service primary teachers participated in the study. Findings demonstrated that TSESESD has good psychometric properties, strong validity and reliability scores, adequate internal consistency (Cronbach α?=?0.97), and satisfactory mean inter-correlation of items within domains (M?=?0.78). TSESESD is considered a reliable instrument for teacher preparation programs aiming to develop primary school teachers’ self-efficacy in ESD.     

Sound–spelling consistency in adults' orthographic learning

Forty‐eight adults were trained on monosyllabic pseudowords and their meanings and then tested in vocal spelling. The orthographic inconsistency of the rime (e.g. orn, awn for ‘glorn’) and the number of learning trials affected accuracy and response latency in the vocal spelling test. In addition, orthographic typicality as assessed by neighbour statistics predicted item spelling accuracy. Spelling accuracy on orthographically consistent items significantly increased with training, suggesting that unfamiliar monosyllables are not necessarily spelled by reliance on sound–spelling correspondences at the rime level. Analysis of spelling errors revealed that good spellers made more spelling errors containing alternative rime spellings and fewer errors that were phonologically inappropriate than poor spellers.     

Viewing students consistently: how stable are teachers’ expectations?

ABSTRACT

Over the past 50 years, research has shown that teacher expectations can influence student outcomes. Many studies have examined within-year effects. There is, however, a paucity of research that has investigated the stability of teachers’ expectations across a single year, and there are no studies that have examined stability beyond 1 year. The current study examined the stability of 94 teachers’ expectations within 3 separate years and across 3 years in mathematics and reading. In both subject areas, teachers’ expectations remained relatively stable from beginning to end-of-year for each separate year and also across 3 years. Additionally, teachers who under- or overestimated their students by more than half a standard deviation continued to do so across all periods in the study. This was despite the teachers having different students each year. The study suggests that teachers view students’ capabilities similarly despite having different student cohorts.