A quality of interrelating: describing a form of meaningful experience on a wilderness river journey

In this paper I identify the components of ‘meaningful experiences’ for participants on a wilderness river rafting journey. The research is phenomenologically informed, and includes interviews, journals, observations and follow-up emails from 32 participants on eight Franklin River (Tasmania) 10-day trips. It elicits individual perceptions of meaningful experiences and combines recollections to reveal the commonalities within those experiences. The research identifies two key recurrent ‘streams of experience’ that provide meaning. The two recurrent streams of experience involved, firstly, a feeling of humility and, secondly, being alive to the present. In this paper I focus on the stream of experience surrounding a feeling of humility, highlighting the qualities of the ways in which participants interrelated with their surrounding environments and the structure of such experiences. Additionally, I consider some unique elements of the wilderness river journey that contributed to the experiences that participants valued as meaningful.     

Historical perspective taking: A standardized measure for an aspect of students' historical thinking

Researchers widely agree that learning history should involve more than learning historical facts and should include competencies of historical thinking. Various models of historical thinking view students' competency to take historical perspectives as a standard in history education. In this study we introduce a standardized measure for historical perspective taking (HPT) consisting of a short scenario set in the German Weimar Republic. We assessed students' HPT by using rating scales; our data were obtained in grammar schools from 170 German 10th graders. Latent class analyses identified three types of students with similar profiles of HPT. One was present-oriented and two showed more or less contextualized historical thinking. Students' history grades were connected to their HPT competency. We discuss limitations of the study and argue for further research on measures assessing students' historical thinking.     

Performance strategies of US Olympians in practice and competition

Until recently, no self‐report instruments have examined psychological skills use in both practice and competition. In light of the significant role of practice in sport performance outcomes, a need exists to measure these skills in both domains. This study was designed to investigate differences in performance strategies of US Olympians in both practice and competition. The Test of Performance Strategies was administered to 176 US participants in the 2000 Sydney Olympic Summer Games. Discriminant function analyses demonstrated significant differences between medalists and nonmedalists in both the competition and practice performance strategies. Furthermore, significant gender and age differences were identified for competition strategies only. The 16 subscales of the TOPS, with two exceptions, create an internally stable instrument with moderate predictive ability relative to quality of sport performance, gender, and age in this elite sample of athletes.     

Regarding Class Quizzes: a Meta-analytic Synthesis of Studies on the Relationship Between Frequent Low-Stakes Testing and Class Performance

Educational Psychology Review - We present the results of a meta-analytic synthesis of the literature on the association between the use of frequent low-stakes quizzes in real classes and...     

Teacher support,student motivation,student need satisfaction,and college teacher course evaluations: testing a sequential path model

Self‐determination theory posits that individuals who have basic psychological needs satisfied while engaging in an activity will be more likely to value and persist in that activity. Scholars in this area have also posited that autonomy‐supportive social contexts are top‐down determinants of individual need satisfaction. To understand better the progression from social to motivational to outcome variables, we tested a four‐step path model within a classroom setting. Data were collected from 220 students in an introductory journalism course, which was subdivided into 14 lab sections. Students were surveyed regarding their feelings about the course, the autonomy support of the instructor, the motivation they felt to engage in the course, and the levels of need satisfaction they experienced. Theoretically‐guided structural equation modeling produced a best‐fitting model in which teacher autonomy support predicted more self‐determined student motivation, which along with teacher autonomy support predicted greater student psychological need satisfaction, which led finally to higher predicted course grades and higher teacher‐course evaluations. Overall, the results replicate and significantly extend previous findings regarding need satisfaction and teacher‐course evaluations. Implications for pedagogy and educational interventions are discussed.