Mediating effects of resistance training skill competency on health-related fitness and physical activity: the ATLAS cluster randomised controlled trial

The purpose of this study was to examine the mediating effect of resistance training skill competency on percentage of body fat, muscular fitness and physical activity among a sample of adolescent boys participating in a school-based obesity prevention intervention. Participants were 361 adolescent boys taking part in the Active Teen Leaders Avoiding Screen-time (ATLAS) cluster randomised controlled trial: a school-based program targeting the health behaviours of economically disadvantaged adolescent males considered “at-risk” of obesity. Body fat percentage (bioelectrical impedance), muscular fitness (hand grip dynamometry and push-ups), physical activity (accelerometry) and resistance training skill competency were assessed at baseline and post-intervention (i.e., 8 months). Three separate multi-level mediation models were analysed to investigate the potential mediating effects of resistance training skill competency on each of the study outcomes using a product-of-coefficients test. Analyses followed the intention-to-treat principle. The intervention had a significant impact on the resistance training skill competency of the boys, and improvements in skill competency significantly mediated the effect of the intervention on percentage of body fat and the combined muscular fitness score. No significant mediated effects were found for physical activity. Improving resistance training skill competency may be an effective strategy for achieving improvements in body composition and muscular fitness in adolescent boys.     

School English,literature and the knowledge-base question

This article takes up questions about knowledge and the school curriculum with respect to literary studies within subject English. Its intention is to focus on literary studies in English from the context of current waves of curriculum reform, rather than as part of the conversations primarily within the field of English, to raise questions about the knowledge agenda, and the knowledge-base agenda for teaching and teacher education. The selection of texts and form of study of literature within the English curriculum has long been an area of controversy. Without assuming a particular position on knowledge in this area, this article shows that important questions of what knowledge-base teachers are expected to bring to their work are elided both in current regulations and debates, and in research on ‘good teaching’ in this area. If ‘literary studies’ (as a discipline or university major) is itself an unstable and changing field, what kind of knowledge does a good English teacher bring to their work? This paper takes up these questions in the context of the Australian Curriculum and standards for teacher registration, but it also points to the way these issues about knowledge are of broader relevance for researchers and teacher education.     

Grasping in the pigeon (Columba livid): Stimulus control during conditioned and consummatory responses

Control of beak opening (gape) and peck location was examined in pigeons. Feeding pecks showed accurate guidance that positioned the seed between the beaks. At the moment of contact with the seed, gape was proportional to seed diameter, although pecks with gape less than seed diameter were more frequent following an increase in seed size during a meal. There were no substantial differences between pigeons trained to keypeck with autoshaping and those trained with operant conditioning procedures. With either procedure, water reinforcement produced keypecks with the beak closed; seed reinforcers of different sizes produced means for gape proportional to the seed diameters. Black or white circular stimuli of different sizes projected as conditioning signals had little influence upon gape, but a greater percentage of responses was directed to white stimuli. These results indicate that visual stimuli elicit and orient the peck, whereas the adjustment of gape also involves the somatosensory stimuli provided during previous experience with a particular reinforcer or food type.     

Market segmentation for improved distance education program planning

Distance education planners face two basic, yet difficult decisions: which students should be targeted and which programs should be offered? This paper reports the process and results of the planning committee of a consortium of engineering schools in the United States that was tasked with these very decisions. A market research study measured the program preferences of potential students. Three program characteristics (course type, delivery method, and time availability) were examined. The results show there is no ‘average’ student and no single program will satisfy all the needs of the student population. Rather, the committee must choose one or more segments based on the program preferences of the students and the resources required to provide the programs.     

Problems Associated with Multi-Media Data Bases

Education is intimately associated with communication, and so may utilize any technology that is able to support a process that enables information to be transferred from one location to another. This paper describes the meaning of the term multi-media data base and presents a model of its potential role in aiding message creation for the purposes of communicating educational material using many parallel channels. Some of the problems associated with the implementation of such systems are outlined.     

Cutting apart together: a diffracted spatial history of an online scholarly relationship

Drawing on the notion of cutting together-apart introduced by Karen Barad and combining it with Lefebvre’s notion of a flaneur (f. flâneuse) who moves between temporal, spatial and political relationships, this article performs a collaboration mediated by social media, namely blogging and tweeting. It draws on the notion of history, space, and social relationships to describe how two women met online. This collaboration as inquiry is about working together despite our differences – finding places to meet rather than diverge, and to dialogue rather than debate. Through a duo-ethnography of how this relationship worked and did not work, notions about how the digital world can act as a mediator for academic work are explored.     

Project Cheddarfield: Supporting Co‐Curricular Themes Through Creative Use of Video Course‐Casting

This article chronicles the coordination and better integration of existing institutional resources to support cocurricular themes embedded in the provision of a large enrollment, video‐mediated undergraduate operations management (OM) course. The name Project Cheddarfield refers to a 2008 initiative in which two professors team‐taught an OM course to over 600 undergraduates on two different continents through the repeated rapid exchange of digital video between the United States and Singapore. Simultaneously infused in this core curricular delivery were themes of global awareness and study‐abroad, including the promotion of one particular opportunity that bridged the two campuses. This action research narrative spans over 5 years of related activity leading up to the initiative, as this project is best understood as a trajectory, or the evolving result of design adapting to unfolding realities.     

Teaching imaginary children: University students’ narratives about their Latino practicum children

This study investigates the dialogic processes involved in how teachers talk about their students and what consequences their ways of talking (i.e., “narratives”) may have for their guidance. We take a sociocultural perspective on learning as transformation of students’ subjectivity. Teaching, as a process of guiding and facilitating learning, cannot be effective if the teacher does not actively seek how the student perceives and understands reality. We borrow and adapt from Bakhtin (1999) four narrative ways of talking about others: objectivizing, subjectivizing, problematizing and finalizing. The presence of these narratives in web discussion postings of our pre-service teachers about the Latino children they worked with in a community center are analyzed. We then compare their ways of talking about children with print- and web-based discussions about children made by in-service teachers, model teachers and our pre-service teachers in a school-based practicum. Using mixed quantitative and qualitative methodologies, we found an overwhelming predominance of objectivizing and finalizing in our pre-service teachers’ narratives about the children with whom they work that seems to define a certain pedagogical regime that we call here “teaching imaginary children/students.” This “way of talking” about children seems to be characterized by unchecked speculations guiding instruction that are not tested by finding out from the children themselves how they understand the instruction and the world. These speculations, in turn, can lead to a dogmatic approach towards children.