Adolescents‘ Self-Efficacy to Overcome Barriers to Physical Activity Scale

This paper describes a revised measure of self-efficacy to overcome barriers to moderate and vigorous physical activity in a sample of 484 high school students in Toronto, Ontario. The students had a mean age of 15.3 years. Principal axis factoring with oblique rotation yielded five factors: self-efficacy to overcome internal, harassment, physical environment, social environment, and responsibilities barriers. Two problematic items were removed, which resulted in a 22-item measure. Subsequent analyses were conducted on responses to this shortened measure. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the five-factor model and demonstrated age- and sexinvariance. The subscales had good internal consistency reliability. Structural regressions demonstrated a strong relationship between the resulting factors and a physical activity measure (energy expenditure), showing predictive validity.     

Avoidance differences between rats and gerbils

Gerbils and rats learned equally well to discriminate the lighted, safe arm from the unsafe arm during Y-maze avoidance trials. Gerbils, however, were inferior to rats in initiating this response in time to avoid shock. Two subsequent experiments on passive avoidance did not support the interpretation of these data based on a greater incidence of shock-induced activity suppression in gerbils. In both experiments, gerbils required more shocks than rats to learn a staying response, indicating a pronounced locomotor response bias in gerbils that is not compatible with the required passive avoidance response. A fourth experiment, using a shuttlebox, found that the relative active avoidance performance by these species depends upon whether intertriai responses are permitted and punished. When they are, gerbils are inferior to rats, since their high level of locomotor responding is not compatible with the behavior required, i.e., staying during the intertrial interval and running during the CS-US interval. On the other hand, gerbils are not inferior when intertrial responses are prohibited, since their locomotor bias is not punished and is compatible with the required avoidance response.     

Turning thinking on its head: How bodies make up their minds

The assumption that bodies have little to do with thinking – other than to be the vehicle that gets a mind to a classroom – deeply underpins the traditional model of schooling. Lessons and seminars are designed on the premise that thinking happens best when people are pretty still, their bodies are quiet and undemanding of attention, and they are writing or talking. Unless it is interfering, the physical body has little to do with cognition. This paper offers an overview of the emerging field of ‘embodied cognition’ that profoundly challenges this model of the mind, and therefore undermines many of the assumptions that underlie the dominant sedentary and disembodied approach to the high-status bits of education.     

Impacts of a Comprehensive School Readiness Curriculum for Preschool Children at Risk for Educational Difficulties

This article reports findings from a cluster‐randomized study of an integrated literacy‐ and math‐focused preschool curriculum, comparing versions with and without an explicit socioemotional lesson component to a business‐as‐usual condition. Participants included 110 classroom teachers from randomized classrooms and approximately eight students from each classroom (N = 760) who averaged 4.48 (SD = 0.44) years of age at the start of the school year. There were positive impacts of the two versions of the curriculum on language, phonological awareness, math, and socioemotional outcomes, but there were no added benefits to academic or socioemotional outcomes for the children receiving explicit socioemotional instruction. Results are discussed with relevance to early childhood theory, policy, and goals of closing the school readiness gap.