Effects of Goal-Setting Interventions on Selected Basketball Skills: A Single-Subject Design

Abstract

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the effects of a goal-setting intervention program on selected components of basketball performance over the course of a competitive season. A multiple-baseline, single-subject design was used with baseline observations on various performance components (e.g., turnovers, rebounds), collected for four elite college basketball players during their first eight games of the season. At the midseason break, these players selected one aspect of their play that they felt would benefit from improvement. A goal-setting program was designed based on the goal attainment scaling procedure recommended by Smith (1988), whereby subjects generated numerical targets for their chosen components. Performance components were then assessed for the next eight games as they had been in the preintervention phase. Following the intervention, 3 of the 4 subjects showed consistent improvements in their targeted area of performance. Also, there were no outcome changes in the performance components that weren't targeted by the subjects. The findings suggest that future studies may benefit from achieving greater ecological validity and utilizing alternative designs to the traditional nomothetic approaches which may tend to mask positive intervention effects on certain individuals.     

The Origins of Football Debate: The Continuing Demise of the Dominant Paradigm, 1852–1856

This article presents original and compelling new material in ‘the origins of football debate’, this time from the period 1852–1856, using the British Library's digitisation project of nineteenth-century newspapers. In so doing, it addresses the alleged disappearance of football in the wider community in mid-century, a problem that has troubled a number of scholars, not least because of the rapid expansion in the game amongst the working and lower middle classes from the 1870s onwards. In addressing this allegation it outlines a much broader and more stable footballing culture across the country than hitherto thought, based on games played at church, work and school outings, rural fetes and galas, alongside those played at celebrations and as street football or casual games in meadows, fields or greens, arguing that those historians who have simply looked for formal games were looking for the wrong forms of football in the wrong places, based on twentieth-century notions of what constitutes a ‘game’ of football. Overall, the article has added yet more evidence of the cultural continuity of football across the mid-century and contributed to the continuing demise of the so-called ‘dominant paradigm’ in the ‘origins of football’ debate.     

Newborn response to auditory stimulus discrepancy

Newborns were assessed for their recovery of head turning toward laterally presented auditory stimuli (titi) that varied from a familiar standard on 1 of 5 levels of fundamental frequency. Following habituation to repeated standard trials, newborns recovered to 14% and 21%, but not to 0%, 7%, or 28% discrepancies, indicating that recovery was a quadratic function of the degree of stimulus-schema discrepancy. Moreover, newborns reliably turned away from the standard stimulus during posthabituation no-change control trials, indicating that the neural network associated with that stimulus was not fatigued. Infants in every condition showed recovery of head turning to a novel posttest stimulus (papa). These data are interpreted with a dual processing model postulated to include both reflexive (context-independent) orientation and stimulus-schema comparison process (context-dependent) orientation.     

Sharing the same world: boys' relations with girls during their last year of primary school

This paper explores the effect of cross gender relations on the construction of boys' masculine identities. The findings are based on data gathered from a year long empirical study of 10 to 11‐year‐old boys set in three UK junior schools. Although masculinity is defined against femininity and boys needed to mark out a set of distinctions from themselves and girls, I found that most boys categorized girls as different (they are not us) rather than oppositional, and the most common reaction was one of detachment and disinterest. Rather than maintaining that there are two separate worlds, I argue that there are two complementary gendered cultures, sharing the one overall school world, which are further nuanced by social class and race/ethnicity. Although there was a tendency of boys to dominate space and girls were often excluded from playground games, many girls refused to be dominated by boys, and some were able to deliberately exercise power over them.     

Urban educators’ perceptions of culturally relevant pedagogy and school reform mandates

In this article, we examine urban teachers’ perceptions of school reform models (SRMs) and culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP). In particular, we examined how urban educators altered mandated reform models in the best interests of their culturally and linguistically diverse students. We discuss data from a phenomenological study, which included in-depth interviews and a focus group with seven urban African-American educators. We explore three facets of the intersection of culturally relevant pedagogy and mandated school reforms: (1) Teachers’ use of CRP to empower urban students; (2) Teachers’ beliefs that SRMs hurt African American students more than help them; (3) Teachers’ adaptations of SRMs with culturally relevant practices. Finally, this article explores the implications for practice and policy when culturally relevant teachers struggle to utilize CRP in the implementation of SRMs.