Three‐year results of the Friendly Schools whole‐of‐school intervention on children's bullying behaviour

A group randomized controlled trial tested the efficacy of the Friendly Schools program to reduce student bullying behaviour. This socio‐ecological intervention targeted the whole school, classroom, family, and individual students to reduce bullying behaviour. Self‐report data were collected in 29 schools over three years from a cohort of 1968 eight to nine‐year‐olds. Surveys measured frequency of being bullied, bullying others, telling if bullied and observing bullying. Results indicate that intervention students were significantly less likely to observe bullying at 12, 24 and 36 months and be bullied after 12 and 36 months, and significantly more likely to tell if bullied after 12 months than comparison students. No differences were found for self‐reported perpetration of bullying. The findings suggest whole‐of‐school programs that engage students in their different social contexts appear to reduce their experiences of being bullied and increase their likelihood of telling someone if they are bullied.     

Evaluating the reflexive practices in a learning experience

Reflexivity is a primary requirement for professional work. Our aim was to describe a methodology suitable for detecting the development of reflexive practice through the analysis of 59 Master’s degree students’ journals. We explore the use and changes of reflexive practice in relation to the settings and activities of the course using analysis of the mental language: We analyse how the reflexive practice is characterized, how it evolves through time and how it can be promoted. Data analysis shows that reflexivity is not monodimensional but multidimensional. Reflexive practice increases during the course: The different dimensions vary over time according to different organizational and educational conditions. This methodology allows us to formulate new hypotheses about which elements of the setting and process are effective in supporting participants’ reflexive practice.     

Further developing the library curriculum: skills for life delivery

This feature discusses how the library curriculum was developed at Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust Library Service to aid the delivery of Skills for Life. In particular, the feature describes how, through collaboration with learndirect, literacy and numeracy skills were embedded into the broader library and information skills training programme. The article reports on how the programme resulted in the provision of qualifications and skills development opportunities to NHS staff, and an increase in the NHS library profile.     

Countermovement jump performance assessment using a wearable 3D inertial measurement unit

The aim of this study was to validate a wearable inertial measurement unit (IMU), containing a 3D accelerometer and gyroscope, for the estimation of countermovement jump height. The absolute vertical acceleration of the IMU positioned on the back of the participant at L5 level, compensated for trunk rotations, was used to obtain jump height by applying the equation of free-fall to the motion of the IMU. The methodology was tested on 28 participants performing five countermovement jumps each. A reference value for this quantity was obtained using stereophotogrammetry (35.4 cm, s = 4.9). Jump height scores obtained using the proposed methodology (35.9 cm, s = 5.5) presented no significant difference with respect to stereophotogrammetry (P = 0.61). A low bias of 0.6 cm confirmed the accuracy of the estimate, which also showed a high (r = 0.87) and significant (P < 0.0001) correlation with reference values. Furthermore, without compensating accelerations for trunk rotation, jump height was largely underestimated (P < 0.0001) (bias: -12.7 cm) and poorly associated (r = 0.31) with stereophotogrammetry. The results of this study show that the estimation of jump height using inertial sensors leads to accurate results when the measured accelerations are corrected for trunk rotations.     

Estimation of the measurement uncertainty and practical suggestion for the description of the metrological traceability in clinical laboratories

Clinicians request a large part of measurements of biological quantities that clinical laboratories perform for diagnostic, prognostic or diseases monitoring purposes. Thus, laboratories need to provide patient’s results as reliable as possible. Metrological concepts like measurement uncertainty and metrological traceability allow to know the accuracy of these results and guarantee their comparability over time and space. Such is the importance of these two parameters that the estimation of measurement uncertainty and the knowledge of metrological traceability is required for clinical laboratories accredited by ISO 15189:2012. Despite there are many publications or guidelines to estimate the measurement uncertainty in clinical laboratories, it is not entirely clear what information and which formulae they should use to calculate it. On the other hand, unfortunately, there are a small number of clinical laboratories that know and describe the metrological traceability of their results, even though they are aware of the lack of comparability that currently exists for patient’s results. Thus, to try to facilitate the task of clinical laboratories, this review aims to provide a proposal to estimate the measurement uncertainty. Also, different suggestions are shown to describe the metrological traceability. Measurement uncertainty estimation is partially based on the ISO/TS 20914:2019 guideline, and the metrological traceability described using the ISO 17511:2020. Different biological quantities routinely measured in clinical laboratories are used to exemplify the proposal and suggestions.     

The mathematics teacher identity of two early career mathematics teachers and the influence of their working communities on its development

Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education - To better understand the critical early years of teaching and teacher identity development, this study explored the mathematics teacher identity of two...     

Assessment of negotiation styles in higher education through a game-based assessment tool

Education and Information Technologies - The purpose of this concurrent mixed-method research is to examine the negotiation styles of candidate sports coaches in higher education by using a...     

Designing Reading Comprehension Assessments for Reading Interventions: How a Theoretically Motivated Assessment Can Serve as an Outcome Measure

When designing a reading intervention, researchers and educators face a number of challenges related to the focus, intensity, and duration of the intervention. In this paper, we argue there is another fundamental challenge—the nature of the reading outcome measures used to evaluate the intervention. Many interventions fail to demonstrate significant improvements on standardized measures of reading comprehension. Although there are a number of reasons to explain this phenomenon, an important one to consider is misalignment between the nature of the outcome assessment and the targets of the intervention. In this study, we present data on three theoretically driven summative reading assessments that were developed in consultation with a research and evaluation team conducting an intervention study. The reading intervention, Reading Apprenticeship, involved instructing teachers to use disciplinary strategies in three domains: literature, history, and science. Factor analyses and other psychometric analyses on data from over 12,000 high school students revealed the assessments had adequate reliability, moderate correlations with state reading test scores and measures of background knowledge, a large general reading factor, and some preliminary evidence for separate, smaller factors specific to each form. In this paper, we describe the empirical work that motivated the assessments, the aims of the intervention, and the process used to develop the new assessments. Implications for intervention and assessment are discussed.