A review of primary and secondary influences on sport expertise

Sport scientists have examined numerous factors influencing the acquisition and manifestation of high levels of performance. These factors can be divided into variables having a primary influence on expertise and variables that have a secondary influence through their interaction with other variables. Primary influences on expertise include genetic, training, and psychological factors while secondary influences include socio‐cultural and contextual elements. This paper reviews the factors affecting the development of expert performance in sport and suggests directions for future research.     

Software for managing complex learning: Examples from an educational psychology course

Inquiry-based instruction including problem-, project-, and case-based methods often incorporate complex sets of learning activities. The numerous activities run the risk of becoming disconnected in the minds of learners and teachers. STAR.Legacy is a software shell that can help designers organize learning activities into an inquiry cycle that is easy to understand and pedagogically sound. To ensure that classroom teachers can adapt the inquiry activities according to their local resources and needs, STAR.Legacy was built upon four types of design principles: learner centered, knowledge centered, assessment centered, and community centered. We describe how a STAR.Legacy constructed for an educational psychology course helped preservice teachers design and learn about effective inquiry-based instruction. This work was supported by grant #R305F60090 from the Department of Education. The authors thank the educational psychology students for their contributions to this paper and Amy Ryce for her editorial talents.     

Toward a Learning Technologies knowledge network

The National Science Foundation-funded Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT) is designed to be a national resource for stimulating research and development of technology-enabled solutions to critical problems in K-14 science, math, engineering and technology learning. The Center, launched at the end of 1997, is organized around four themes identified as areas where research is likely to result in major gains in teaching and learning, and sponsors research across disciplines and institutions in its four theme areas. CILT brings together experts in the fields of cognitive science, educational technologies, computer science, subject matter learning, and engineering. It engages business through an Industry Alliance Program and is also training postdoctoral students. CILT's founding organizations are SRI International's Center for Technology in Learning, University of California at Berkeley (School of Education and Department of Computer Science), Vanderbilt University's Learning Technology Center, and the Concord Consortium. Through its programs, CILT seeks to reach beyond these organizations to create a web of organizations, individuals, industries, schools, foundations, government agencies, and labs, that is devoted to the production, sharing and use of new knowledge about how learning technologies can dramatically improve the processes and outcomes of learning and teaching. This paper describes the rationale and operations of the Center, and first-year progress in defining a set of CILT partnership projects with many other institutions that came out of our national theme-team workshops. Roy Pea, of SRI International, is Director of CILT. Marcia Linn (U. California, Berkeley), John Bransford (Vanderbilt University), Barbara Means (SRI International), and Robert Tinker (Concord Consortium), serve as CILT's coprincipal investigators. Sherry Hsi (Ubiquitous Computing) and Sean Brophy (Technology and Assessment Models) are among the first group of CILT Postdoctoral Fellows. Jeremy Roschelle (SRI International) and Nancy Songer (University of Michigan) are CILT theme-team leaders. Roy Pea and Marcia Linn would like to thank the Spencer Foundation for support during their year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, in which they developed the CILT concept with the other authors. CILT is funded by National Science Foundation grant #CDA-9720384. Pea and Linn would also like to acknowledge contributions to this article by the many authors of CILT partnership project proposals, and by theme-team leaders. The authors thankfully acknowledge Donna Baranski-Walker for her many contributions to developing the CILT Industrial Alliance Program while serving as its Director in 1998.     

Heredity, reproduction, and perfectibility in revolutionary and Napoleonic France, 1789-1815

During the French Revolution, there appeared a striking and far-ranging medical literature on heredity, reproduction and biological 'perfectibility'. In some ways anticipating ideas associated with modern eugenics, these writings emerged from radical revolutionary projects for 'physical and moral regeneration' and incarnated deep-seated desires to transform French society and make a 'new man' in mind and body. But by breaking down boundaries between public and private life, doctors did more than just try to regulate intimate sexual behaviour. Instead, they proffered a more intimate vision of civic volunteerism, in which sexual hygiene and domestic practices allowed their patients to imagine new forms of society and gave them ways to attain these socio-political dreams. Moreover, they were responding to powerful new worries about heredity and sought to counsel their patients in the ways of family panning. By the end of revolutionary period, then, medical and lay thinkers had transformed the marriage bed and household into a specially controlled environment - a kind of affective laboratory - in which conscientious parents could make healthy children and raise them in the context of specific political and social values.     

The influence of training load,exposure to match play and sleep duration on daily wellbeing measures in youth athletes

This study assessed the influence of training load, exposure to match play and sleep duration on two daily wellbeing measures in youth athletes. Forty-eight youth athletes (age 17.3 ± 0.5 years) completed a daily wellbeing questionnaire (DWB), the Perceived Recovery Status scale (PRS), and provided details on the previous day’s training loads (TL) and self-reported sleep duration (sleep) every day for 13 weeks (n = 2727). Linear mixed models assessed the effect of TL, exposure to match play and sleep on DWB and PRS. An increase in TL had a most likely small effect on muscle soreness (d = ?0.43;± 0.10) and PRS (d = ?0.37;± 0.09). Match play had a likely small additive effect on muscle soreness (d = ?0.26;± 0.09) and PRS (d = ?0.25;± 0.08). An increase in sleep had a most likely moderate effect on sleep quality (d = 0.80;± 0.14); a most likely small effect on DWB (d = 0.45;± 0.09) and fatigue (d = 0.42;± 0.11); and a likely small effect on PRS (d = 0.25;± 0.09). All other effects were trivial or did not reach the pre-determined threshold for practical significance. The influence of sleep on multiple DWB subscales and the PRS suggests that practitioners should consider the recovery of an athlete alongside the training stress imposed when considering deviations in wellbeing measures.     

Benefactors and beneficiaries in social capital exchanges

Abstract

Social capital research that specifically interrogates the motives for both benefactors and beneficiaries typically gives short shrift to the motives of beneficiaries, instead focusing on those of benefactors. Building on ideas first proposed in gift-giving and help-seeking research, this paper pays particular attention to the motives of recipients in social capital exchanges. Based on fieldwork in a youth baseball league in the American Southwest, I will argue that recipient motives for accepting (or asking for) help from another parent in the league are complex and worth studying on their own merit. Motives are explored for three of the four types of benefits typically exchanged in the Valley City Little League: Emotional Support, Information Sharing, and Job Information Sharing. Childcare is treated elsewhere.     

The curious case of child care: an anomaly within social capital exchange motives in a youth sport organization

Abstract

Examinations of motives for benefactors and beneficiaries in social capital exchanges typically examines motives of benefactors, leaving those of recipients unexamined. Based on 18 months of fieldwork in a youth baseball league in the American Southwest, I propose in this paper that, in some cases, the motives of beneficiaries are in fact more complicated and interesting to interrogate than the motives of benefactors. I provide a detailed look at one of these types of exchanges in particular that was typical within the Valley City Little League, that of childcare. Based on this work, I propose that social capital researchers will do well to advance the overall concept by placing a greater emphasis on recipient motives.     

Exploring the Use of Electroencephalography to Gather Objective Evidence of Cognitive Processing During Problem Solving

Currently, there is significant interest being directed towards the development of STEM education to meet economic and societal demands. While economic concerns can be a powerful driving force in advancing the STEM agenda, care must be taken that such economic imperative does not promote research approaches that overemphasize pragmatic application at the expense of augmenting the fundamental knowledge base of the discipline. This can be seen in the predominance of studies investigating problem solving approaches and procedures, while neglecting representational and conceptual processes, within the literature. Complementing concerns about STEM graduates’ problem solving capabilities, raised within the pertinent literature, this paper discusses a novel methodological approach aimed at investigating the cognitive elements of problem conceptualization. The intention is to demonstrate a novel method of data collection that overcomes some of the limitations cited in classic problem solving research while balancing a search for fundamental understanding with the possibility of application. The methodology described in this study employs an electroencephalographic (EEG) headset, as part of a mixed methods approach, to gather objective evidence of students’ cognitive processing during problem solving epochs. The method described provides rich evidence of students’ cognitive representations of problems during episodes of applied reasoning. The reliability and validity of the EEG method is supported by the stability of the findings across the triangulated data sources. The paper presents a novel method in the context of research within STEM education and demonstrates an effective procedure for gathering rich evidence of cognitive processing during the early stages of problem conceptualization.