The Roles and Responsibilities of Kinesiology Regarding Sport

This article is a response to the 2013 NAKHE meeting in San Diego, California. The assigned strand was the roles and responsibilities of kinesiology regarding sport. The article is a response of the strand leader, comments from the participants in the strand, and possible solutions to the strand direction.     

Head Start and child care providers’ motivators,barriers and facilitators to practicing family-style meal service

This paper presents a qualitative investigation of the motivators, barriers, and facilitators for practicing family-style meal service (FSMS) from the perspective of 18 child care providers serving preschool children in Head Start (HS), Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) funded, and non-CACFP child-care centers. Providers were selected based on maximum variation purposive sampling and semi-structured interviews were conducted until saturation was reached. Provider responses were systematically coded using thematic analysis. HS and CACFP providers reported being motivated to practice FSMS because it created pleasant mealtimes, opportunities to role model healthy eating, and healthful child development. CACFP and non-CACFP providers reported not using FSMS because it was resource intensive, messy, and seemed to violate CACFP policy. HS and CACFP providers offered suggestions to overcome these barriers. They suggested that FSMS eventually becomes easier with practice, children can self-regulate their energy intake, and teaching children self-help skills during play time can avoid messes during mealtimes. Findings from this study have implications for programming, policy, and research.     

Apolitical politics: GOP efforts to foster identification from Latinos, 1984–2000

The growth and youth of the U.S. Latino population at the close of the 20^th century makes them a desired constituency for both major political parties. Intriguingly, the party organization which has long resisted the recognition of internal voting blocs—the GOP—allocated unprecedented resources between 1980 and 2000 to inspire identification from Latinos. This study investigates the nature of these invitations. Specifically, it reveals how a party, whose organizational identity opposes acknowledging individuals as ethnic group members, appeals to an ethnic group. By examining (a) English and Spanish language television advertisements and (b) elite interview data with Republican Latino strategists, we argue that these ads depict satisfied Latino citizens, emphasize Latino family connections, and eschew traditional political issues. These identification strategies are notable for they may have considerable effects on the American polity at the dawn of, and well into, the 21^st century.     

High-Impact Educational Practices: An Exploration of the Role of Information Literacy

There is an expectation that college students graduate with competency in information literacy. Ideally, institutions of higher education integrate these competencies throughout their curricula in a progressive manner. High-impact educational practices contribute to student success. The purpose of this article is to examine recent literature about five of the high-impact educational practices (capstone experiences, learning communities, service learning and community-based learning, undergraduate research, and writing-intensive courses) to understand the extent to which they include the integration of information literacy competencies. The article includes recommendations for practice and research in the areas of assessment, pedagogy, and program planning.     

Letter from the Editor

Getting help in understanding how to use and interpret a new information system is a crucial organizational and individual resource. Indeed, both informal and formal sources of information technology help are expensive and necessary, but largely unidentified, unmanaged, and underresearched. This study proposes that two types of factors influence the formation of information technology helping relationships: individual and structural. Based on a survey of employees in an organization implementing a new workstation‐based customer database system, the study compares influences on being sought as an informal source of IT help, and on types of help (individual or positional) that one seeks. One individual factor (some forms of computer expertise) and most structural factors (especially measures of employees’ perceived socialization, task interdependence, and communication networks) exerted weak but significant influences on employees’ IT helping relationships.     

Managing Health Care in Oregon: The Search for a Civic Bioethics

Managed health care deliberations in Oregon point to a "civic bioethics" model to resolve allocation issues through publicly articulated community values and priorities that influence legislative action. Communication practices in the Oregon experiment provide data to develop an evaluative framework to assess public moral deliberation in value-laden contexts such as health care distribution. The Oregon experience also points to dialogical virtues to heighten citizens' ethical sensibilities and political will, discursive tools to inform ethical communication practices in a civic bioethics model.     

Representing 30 years of higher education change: UK universities and the Times Higher

This paper argues that the Times Higher provides a powerful tool for understanding the changing character of UK higher education (HE) and can usefully be seen as representative, and in some ways constitutive, of that changing character. Drawing on an analysis of a sample of stories from the Times Higher, it documents the changing policy climate of UK HE from 1979 to 2010. It offers a broadly chronological account of themes that have emerged as prominent at different times during this period, pointing, inter alia, to fears about threats to the humanities, the rise of various forms of instrumentalism and the incorporation of HE institutions and agencies into a common mindset characterised by a preoccupation with marketing and corporate success. The last of these is embodied in the changing format of the newspaper itself and in its own activities as a key player in the HE sector, notably as a sponsor of university rankings and awards. Whilst being sensitive to countervailing tendencies, the authors suggest that the growing instrumentalisation of HE and related cultural shifts represent a changed ‘structure of feeling’ in UK HE. They conclude that the university rankings, awards and other image commodities that are a key part of this changed structure of feeling now play such a substantial role in the cultural life of universities that the norms of both rationality and professional ethics which tended to prevail in deliberations about university strategy 30 years ago may no longer be taken for granted.     

Using Multidimensional Scaling and Unfolding to Explore Teacher Perceptual Biases for Selected Special Education Referral Categories

Multidimensional scaling (POLYCON) and unfolding (PREFMAP) algorithms developed by Young (24) and Carroll (3), respectively, were used to explore teacher perceptions of special education labels (e.g., emotional disturbance) in terms of a reference set of 28 student behaviors (e.g., withdrawn, short attention span) across two context variables: student gender and student ethnicity. The resulting two-dimensional scaling solution revealed teacher perceptual distinctions between student acting-out and passive behaviors, and between student intellectual impairment and specific behavior problems. In addition, scaling analyses also suggested teacher perceptual biases that required both males and minority (i.e., black) students to behave more extremely before being seen by teachers as having either learning or emotional problems.     

Can an Advance Organizer Technique Compensate for Poor Reading Conditions?

In Experiment 1, 201 college students read both a literary and a technical text either in an advance organizer condition or a non-organizer control condition. Results failed to support the hypothesis that an organizing schema would help subjects with good reasoning skills compensate for poor memory skills or information overload caused by speeded reading conditions. In Experiment 2, data from a sample of 189 college subjects demonstrated that real-world distractions do cause significant learning decrements but failed to support predictions that an organizer would aid distractible students and would compensate for distracting study conditions. Findings suggest that the organizer technique does not help compensate for processing deficits related to information overload or distracting study conditions.