Psychological Mood Profiles of Sighted and Unsighted Beep Baseball Players

Purpose: Decline of motor performance in older individuals affects their quality of life. Understanding the contribution of sport-related training in advanced ages might help to attenuate motor performance decay as one gets older. The purpose of our study was to evaluate the extent to which long-lasting training in running or sport-specific skills during old age preserves motor performance in different motor tasks. Method: Older runners and tennis players with at least 10 years of training were assessed as were age-matched and young exercisers. Performance was evaluated for 6 motor tasks requiring different functions of sensorimotor control expected to decline with aging. Results: Analysis revealed that runners had increased aerobic fitness in comparison with the other older participants and that they presented similar performance to older exercisers in the motor tasks. Tennis players outperformed the other groups of older participants on coincident timing and simple reaction time and achieved similar performance to the young group on the timing task. Conclusions: These results suggest selective maintenance of task-specific processing through extensive practice of tennis-related motor skills in older adults.     

The Effects of a Group Contingency Strategy on Behaviorally Disordered Students in Physical Education

Abstract

An A-B-A-B time-series design was used to determine the effectiveness of a group contingency strategy in modifying on-task behavior of behaviorally disordered students in a physical education setting. A younger group (n = 12) with a mean age of 7.8 years, and an older group (n = 11) with a mean age of 11.2 years, participated in a study in which activity reinforcement for each group was contingent upon correct observation of the rules established for class. The group contingency strategy was significantly effective in increasing the percentage of on-task behavior of both groups of students. In addition, there was no significant difference in the response to treatment between younger and older students, and there were no individuals within either group who did not respond favorably to treatment.     

The Differential Effect of Indirect Instruction in the Teaching of Sport Skills on Critical Thinking and Self-esteem of Early Adolescent Boys Placed at Risk

The purpose of this study was to examine the differential effect of sport skills instruction (SSI) and sport skills instruction plus initiative games (SSI +) on the critical thinking (CT) and self-esteem scores of early adolescent boys placed at risk. Students in the SSI + group ( n = 36) participated in initiative games classes in addition to their sport skills activities. Students in the SSI group (n = 44) participated in the sport skills activities only. Since the boys were divided by age (10-11 & 12-13), the influence of age on the dependent variables was also investigated. Classes taught by the initiative games teacher were student-centered while the sport skills classes were teacher-centered. Significant differences between teacher behaviors occurred in interaction patterns, instructional strategies, and management concerns. There were no differences on self-esteem scores. The results supported the addition of initiative games to SSI to foster CT with this group of participants.     

The Effects of Training in Social Perspective Taking on Socially Maladjusted Girls

A paucity of research exists concerning training programs for the development of interpersonal functioning in socially maladjusted or delinquent adolescent females. Females in a residential institution participated in a role-play program designed to enhance social perspective-taking ability. In 15 sessions girls were coached in specific social skills and acted multiple role perspectives in typical problem situations. Compared to girls in a fitness training program, girls in the role-play training program showed enhanced performance on a measure of social perspective taking. Generalized effects were also found for performance on tests of interpersonal problem analysis, empathy, and the acceptance of individual differences. Additionally, observational data indicated that role-play training resulted in increased prosocial behaviors. Role-play training had no effect on a measure of referential communication.     

LEARNING ABOUT TEACHING THE EXTRACURRICULAR TOPIC OF NANOTECHNOLOGY AS A VEHICLE FOR ACHIEVING A SUSTAINABLE CHANGE IN SCIENCE EDUCATION

This study focused on teachers’ transfer of a variety of teaching methods from a teaching module on nanotechnology, which is an example of a topic outside the science curriculum, to teaching topics that are part of the chemistry curriculum. Nanotechnology is outside the science curriculum, but it was used in this study as a means to carry out a change in the way chemistry teachers teach. The participants in the study included nine high school in-service chemistry teachers. Three research tools were used: (1) semistructured interviews that were conducted with the teachers, after they had finished teaching their nanotechnology module, and follow-up semistructured interviews that were conducted 2 years after the teachers had taught the nanotechnology module , and teachers’ assessment and evaluation of their own teaching method, determining how the nanotechnology modules influenced the students who learned according to this program. The data collection process continued for 5 years. Most of the teachers indicated that they continued teaching the nanotechnology module that they designed and all of them stated that they integrated the unique teaching methods into their teaching of chemistry. High efficacy beliefs were built based on the self-evaluation process that was part of the teachers’ professional development program. Teaching self-efficacy beliefs and organization efficacy beliefs was found to contribute to teachers’ sustainable changes. The findings in the current research are only limited to the topic of nanotechnology; however, we believe that similar results can be obtained for any modern scientific topic that is outside the high school science curriculum. We suggest that more research should be done to determine whether the same findings emerge by using the same approach but on another topic.     

A deniable and efficient question and answer service over ad hoc social networks

When people are connected together over ad hoc social networks, it is possible to ask questions and retrieve answers using the wisdom of the crowd. However, locating a suitable candidate for answering a specific unique question within larger ad hoc groups is non-trivial, especially if we wish to respect the privacy of users by providing deniability. All members of the network wish to source the best possible answers from the network, while at the same time controlling the levels of attention required to generate them by the collective group of individuals and/or the time taken to read all the answers. Conventional expert retrieval approaches rank users for a given query in a centralised indexing process, associating users with material they have previously published. Such an approach is antithetical to privacy, so we have looked to distribute the routing of questions and answers, converting the indexing process into one of building a forwarding table. Starting from the simple operation of flooding the question to everyone, we compare a number of different routing options, where decisions must be made based on past performance and exploitation of the knowledge of our immediate neighbours. We focus on fully decentralised protocols using ant-inspired tactics to route questions towards members of the network who may be able to answer them well. Simultaneously, privacy concerns are acknowledged by allowing both question asking and answering to be plausibly deniable. We have found that via our routing method, it is possible to improve answer quality and also reduce the total amount of user attention required to generate those answers.     

Facilitating growth in prospective teachers’ knowledge: teaching geometry in primary schools

This paper reports on a study that focused on growth of understanding about teaching geometry by a group of prospective teachers engaged in lesson plan study within a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment. Participation in the activity was found to facilitate considerable growth in the participants?? pedagogical-content knowledge (PCK). Factors that influenced growth in PCK included the nature of the lesson planning task, the cognitive scaffolds inserted into the CSCL virtual space, the meta-language scaffolds provided to the participants, and the provision of both private and public discourse spaces. The paper concludes with recommendations for enhancing effective knowledge-building discourse about mathematics PCK within prospective teacher education CSCL environments.     

Talking Smack: Verbal Aggression in Professional Wrestling

The current study presents the results of a content analysis of the verbal aggression found in 36 hours of televised professional wrestling. The coding scheme was adapted from the National Television Violence Study and past research on television verbal aggression. Results show that an abundance of verbal aggression occurs in televised professional wrestling, with swearing, competence attacks, and character attacks being the most common types. In addition, the primary motives for verbal aggression use are amusement and anger. Furthermore, verbal aggression tends to be communicated and received by White, male individuals with no clear dispositional characteristics. The results are discussed in terms of potential effects of exposure to the verbal aggression found in professional wrestling.