Knowledge of bout duration influences pacing strategies during small-sided games

This investigation examines pacing during intermittent team sports. Sixteen junior Rugby League players participated in eight different small-sided offside touch games. All games were 24 min, but bout durations differed in continuous (1 × 24 min) or repeated (2 × 12, 3 × 8, 4 × 6, 6 × 4, 8 × 3, 12 × 2 or 24 × 1 min) formats. Repeat bouts were interspersed by 2 min of passive rest, and participants were informed of the bout duration immediately prior to the game. Heart rates, ratings of perceived exertion and data gathered from global positioning system devices were used to investigate the pacing strategies employed within each game. No significant (P > 0.05) between-game differences were observed in total distance; however, during the 1-min bouts, high-speed movement was significantly (P < 0.05) increased, during the first and second quarters of the 24 × 1-min game compared to all other formats (effect size range: 0.75 ± 0.61–1.38 ± 0.47). Furthermore, the rate of decline in high-speed movement over-time was greatest during the 24 × 1-min game with large differences observed between the first and third quarters (effect size: 0.90 ± 0.58). Greater moderate-speed (effect size range: 0.62 ± 0.63–1.56 ± 0.40) and less low-speed (effect size range: 0.69 ± 0.62–1.54 ± 0.40) distances were also observed during the 1-min bouts, yet heart rates were higher during the continuous 1 × 24-min game. Pacing strategies during intermittent activities are influenced by the number and duration of exercise bouts. Practitioners should consider within-game bout durations when prescribing game-based activities to improve aerobic capacity.     

Health information seeking behaviour: the librarian's role in supporting digital and health literacy

This paper is based on Rachel Butler's dissertation carried out at the University of Sheffield as part of the MA Library and Information Services Management. The study examines people's online health information seeking skills, with the specific aim to identify how libraries and health services can work together in supporting digital and health literacy. A survey approach is used to explore online searching habits as well as librarian and health professionals’ views on health literacy. The key findings indicate that whilst the majority of respondents consider themselves to be health literate, there was an overall agreement that effective education and support could be achieved through the collaboration between libraries and health services, and specifically to signpost information and to provide targeted education. The limitations of the research for dissertation are recognised leading to recommendations that further study focuses on the impact of signposting and education on health literacy.F.J.     

Between education and psychology: school staff perspectives

When discussing contributions from psychology in/to educational practices like school-based mental health promotion, it is peculiar that psychologists (of an educational or clinical kind) or education-oriented sociologists, both not often based in schools or classrooms, dominate the topic. It has been acknowledged that school staff have been over looked and underutilised in contributing to the discussion, particularly as this pertains to sharing perspectives on how they experience their role in relationship to education policy and practice. The study presented here looked to address this situation by seeking the perspectives of school staff on a range of concerns situated at the nexus between education and psychology. Contrary to the type of displaced assessment intimated above, this group of school staff generally accepts they perform a crucial task in supporting students, their main concern being to incisively question how they might negotiate existing role-related pressures to better current school-based practice.     

Longitudinal analysis of the environmental attitudes of university students

This article addresses the important questions that higher education institutions ask concerning their impact on their students’ sustainability-related attributes ‘How do our students’ worldviews change as they experience higher education with us?’ The process of monitoring such a dynamic entity is fraught with statistical complexity but may not be impossible for an institution willing to ask whether or not its educational efforts in ‘education for sustainability’, ‘education for sustainable development’ or ‘environmental education’, and campus sustainability developments, are paralleled by changes in the attitudes of its students. We describe here a longitudinal survey process based on the revised New Ecological Paradigm scale, with two cohorts of students, in three programmes of study, operating over four years, with multiple survey inputs by each student. We implemented the longitudinal analysis using a linear mixed-effects model and describe here the development and testing of this model. We conclude that higher education institutions can benchmark the sustainability attributes of their students and monitor changes, if they are minded to. We invite higher education practitioners worldwide to join us in further developing suitable research instruments, processes and statistical models, and in further analysing the assumptions that link higher education to sustainability and to global citizenship.     

Strategies that promote historical reasoning and contextualization: a pilot intervention with urban high school students

Reading and Writing - The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of two types of historical problem-solving instruction with advanced urban high school students’...