Sex,drugs and science: the IOC’s and IAAF’s attempts to control fairness in sport

Abstract

This paper traces the history of two important policies in sport: rules against drugs and ‘ambiguous’ athletes in women’s events. We identify three phases in the work of the International Olympic Committee’s and International Amateur Athletic Federation’s medical committees: (1) from the mid-1960s to the 1970s, the medical grounding of the committees and the members’ worldviews encouraged the groups to enlist scientific techniques to solve drug use and sex ambiguity issues; (2) from the 1970s to the 1980s, administrative confusion underscored both committees, but scientific personnel gained legitimacy and furthered their own agendas; and (3) from the 1980s to the mid-1980s, the seeds of diversion in sex and drug tests were sown. The central finding of this study is that the stakeholders who shaped anti-doping and sex testing policies took for granted concerns regarding ethics and instead increasingly relied upon medical, scientific, and technical practices to define and control fairness in sport.     

How Accurate Is Peer Grading?

Previously we showed that weekly, written, timed, and peer-graded practice exams help increase student performance on written exams and decrease failure rates in an introductory biology course. Here we analyze the accuracy of peer grading, based on a comparison of student scores to those assigned by a professional grader. When students graded practice exams by themselves, they were significantly easier graders than a professional; overall, students awarded ≈25% more points than the professional did. This difference represented ≈1.33 points on a 10-point exercise, or 0.27 points on each of the five 2-point questions posed. When students graded practice exams as a group of four, the same student-expert difference occurred. The student-professional gap was wider for questions that demanded higher-order versus lower-order cognitive skills. Thus, students not only have a harder time answering questions on the upper levels of Bloom's taxonomy, they have a harder time grading them. Our results suggest that peer grading may be accurate enough for low-risk assessments in introductory biology. Peer grading can help relieve the burden on instructional staff posed by grading written answers-making it possible to add practice opportunities that increase student performance on actual exams.     

Analysis of patterns in time for evaluating effectiveness of first principles of instruction

Educational technology research and development - In this naturalistic design-research study, we tracked 172,417 learning journeys of students who were interacting with an online resource, the...     

Content Familiarity: Differential Impact of Effective Teaching on Student Achievement Outcomes

Improving the quality of higher education for all students requires researchers to focus on factors that potentially influence learning. Of particular interest are student entry characteristics and effective teaching behaviors. Accordingly, structural equation modeling was used to examine the relationships between student differences, prior experience with the subject material, past performances, teaching behaviors, and perceived learning and achievement. A theoretical model containing 8 variables was formulated and tested on students who were either experienced or inexperienced with the course material. The data were gathered at a large midwestern university fitting the Carnegie classification as a research institution. Overall, student achievement is affected by test anxiety and high school GPA. Prior experience with the course content revealed that content-unfamiliar students' perception of learning is more positively influenced by instructor organization than by instructor expressiveness, whereas for content-familiar students, expressiveness is much more influential than organization. Additionally, content-unfamiliar students are more sensitive to both teaching behaviors than content-familiar students. These findings have important implications for administrators, instructors, and researchers.     

Self-directed learning and schooling: Identifying pertinent theories and illustrative research

Changing modern societies offering diversified opportunities for self-education require citizens who are self-directed in their approach to learning. In this review, self-directed learners are characterized as manifesting personal attributes of self-acceptance as a learner, planfulness in learning activities, intrinsic motivation for learning, ability to internalize the evaluation process, openness to experience, flexibility in the approach to learning, and autonomy in the setting of learning goals and selection of the means of learning.Contemporary writers critical of the school maintain that learner attributes like the above are suppressed or prevented from developing because schools require conformity and induce dependency. Others feel that the right kind of schooling can enhance self-direction in learners. Unfortunately, evidence of the latter is lacking. Six theoretical positions on human learning that have relevance to the development of self-direction are identified and are here labelled: modeling, reinforcement, curiosity motivation, competency motivation, attribution theory and personal causation, and humanistic.All of the suggested attributes of the self-directed learner are found to be related to one or more of the theories examined. Finally, four approaches to educational practice explicity associated with self-direction are identified: experiential learning, discovery learning, the open classroom,and structured individualization.In general, there is some positive evidence that attributes of self-directed learning can be deliberately taught, though more intensive studies of particular types of school environments as well as longitudinal research are badly needed.

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Zusammenfassung Im Wandel befindliche moderne Gesellschaften mit differenzierten Selbstbildungs-Möglichkeiten brauchen Bürger, die auf selbstbestimmtes Lernen ausgerichtet sind. In dieser Studie werden selbst bestimmende Lernende charakterisiert durch Eigenschaften wie Selbst-Anerkennung als Lernender, geplantes Lernen, innere Lern-Motivation, die Fähigkeit, den Evaluationsprozess zu verinnerlichen, Erfahrungsoffenheit, Flexibilität in Lernansätzen, und Autonomie in Festlegen von Lernzielen sowie in der Wahl von Lernmitteln.Zeitgenössische Kritiker der Schule behaupten, Eigenschaften wie die obigen würden unterdrückt oder in ihrer Entwicklung behindert, weil die Schule Konformität verlangt und Abhängigkeit anerzieht. Andere sind der Ansicht, dass die richtige Art von Schulunterricht die Selbstbestimmung bei den Lernenden verstärken kann; hierfür fehlt es jedoch leider an Beweisen. Sechs theoretische, für die Entwicklung von Selbstbestimmung relevante Positionen in bezug auf menschliches Lernen werden vom Verfasser herausgearbeitet. Er bezeichnet sie als Lernen am Vorbild, Verstärkung, Neugier-Motivation, Kompetenz-Motivation, Attributionstheorie und persönliche Kausation,und Menschenbildung.All diese Eigenschaften stehen in Bezug zu einer oder mehreren der untersuchten Theorien. Schliesslich werden vier verschiedene Ansätze zur Bildungspraxis identifiziert: erfahrendes Lernen, entdeckendes Lernen, offener Unterrichtund strukturierte Individualisierung.Allgemein gesprochen, gibt es einige Hinweise darauf, dass selbstbestimmtes Lernen gezielt gelehrt werden kann; doch bedarf es noch eingehender Untersuchungen über bestimmte Unterrichtstypen sowie longitudinaler Forschung.

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Résumé Les sociétés modernes en évolution qui offrent des opportunités diversifiées d'autodidaxie, doivent avoir des citoyens capables d'auto-diriger le procesus d'acquisition de leurs connaissances. Dans ce compte-rendu, les individus auto-dirigés sont caractérisés comme capables de diagnostiquer leurs propres besoins de connaissances, faisant preuve d'une motivation intrinsèque,, d'une aptitude à intérioriser le processus d'évaluation, d'une ouverture à l'expérience, d'une flexibilité dans l'approche de l'acquisition des connaissances, d'une autonomie dans la fixation des objectifs et le choix des moyens d'apprentissage.Les auteurs contemporains qui critiquent le système scolaire soutiennent que les qualités de l'individu autodirigeant son apprentissage, telles qu'elles sont mentionnées ci-dessus, sont étouffées, ou qu'un obstacle est mis à leur développement, parce que les écoles exigent la conformité et incitent à la dépendance. D'autres auteurs estiment qu'une scolarité bien comprise peut développer l'autodirection chez l'individu qui apprend; malheureusement ils n'en fournissent pas les preuves.Six positions théoriques sur l'acquisition des connaissances ayant un rapport avec le développement de l'auto-direction sont identifiées et désignées comme suit: imitation d'un modèle, renforcement, motivation de la curiosité, motivation de la compétence, théorie de l'attribution de la causalité personnelle et théorie humaniste. On a trouvé que toutes les qualités avancées comme étant celles de l'individu autodirigé, s'apparentent à une ou plusieurs des théories examinées.Finalement, quatre approches de la pratique pédagogique, explicitement associées à l'auto-direction, sont décrites: l'apprentissage empirique, l'apprentissage par la découverte, la classe ouverte, l'individualisation structurée. Il existe en général quelque preuve positive que les qualités de l'apprentissage auto-dirigé peuvent être délibérément enseignées, mais le besoin d'études plus poussées sur des types particuliers d'environnement scolaire, et de recherche longitudinale, se fait fortement sentir.

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This review is a part of a multinational research project, Lifelong Education and the School: Organizing the Learning Process to Enhance Self-Direction, (Project 4.17), currently being conducted by the Unesco Institute for Education.     

Naturalizing negativity: how journalism textbooks justify crime,conflict, and “bad” news

This critical analysis of U.S. journalism textbooks from 1894 to 2016 shows how texts across decades have (re)constructed a discourse of damage through news values emphasizing and rationalizing conflict and bad news. Findings are reported in the context of literature suggesting that negative news values foster a distorted sense of social relations, increase fear, and depress civic participation. Literature also indicates that non-journalists often view news through less conflict-oriented, and more value-laden, frames, suggesting that journalistic values are not natural or inevitable but subject to change. The discourse in journalism textbooks can be a key site for understanding and influencing journalism culture. Constructive alternatives to the dominant discourse are suggested.     

Sport and re/creation: what skateboarders can teach us about learning

This paper explores the role of digital media and creativity in the processes of learning that occur in groups of urban skateboarders. In particular, it examines how the production and consumption of amateur videos contribute to both skaters’ mastery of the techniques of the sport and their integration into the culture of the sport. The data come from an ethnographic study of skateboarders in Hong Kong, which included in-depth interviews, participant observation and the collection of texts and artifacts like magazines, blog entries and amateur skating videos. Skateboarders use video in a number of ways that significantly impact their learning and integration into their communities. They use it to analyze tricks and techniques, to document the stages of their learning and socialization into the group, to set community standards, to build a sense of belonging with their ‘crews’ and to imagine ‘idealized futures’ for themselves and their communities. Understanding the value and function of such ‘semiotic mediation’ in learning and socialization into sport cultures, I suggest, can contribute to helping physical educators design tasks that integrate training in physical skills with opportunities for students to make meaning around their experiences of sport and physical education.