Modalités de prise de décision chez les filles et les garçons en la présence ou en l’absence de l’enseignant

How girls and boys take decisions in the presence and absence of a teacher – This work is part of an innovative approach to physical and sports education in Tunisia, and team sports in particular. It uses language studies carried out within the framework of this teaching both to generate a reflective attitude on the part of students, and to identify the effect of gender as a variable in the ways in which they make decisions. Discourse analysis highlights the importance of language output by girls and boys in football teaching when a teacher is present or absent. The teacher is an institutional authority who imposes specific uses of language, and when he/she is absent, emotional tensions predominate and may reflect the repression of ideas that occurs when the teacher is present. Although girls appear to take part in the discussion, their utterances are fewer in number, and their analytical statements less effective than those of boys. Girls never gain the upper hand over boys. The study also suggests a redefinition of social role divisions on the basis of gender – masculinity and femininity.     

The Effect of Implicit Stereotypes on the Physical Performance of Older Adults

The purpose of this study was to explore how stereotypes affect physical performance in older adults. During Experiment 1, older adults were primed with objects representing aging stereotypes to determine whether these objects can activate stereotypes of aging. Results from the first part of this study provide evidence that certain material objects have implicit meaning and can activate stereotypes of aging. During Experiment 2, 96 community dwelling older adults were randomly assigned to one of three groups: exposure to positive stereotypes of aging (n = 32), exposure to negative stereotypes of aging (n = 32), or a neutral condition (n = 31). Gait speed, standing balance, and lower extremity muscle performance were tested before and after exposure to the objects. Results revealed no significant differences between those exposed to positive stereotypes, negative stereotypes, or the neutral condition. Physical performance was not affected by exposure to objects related to stereotypes of aging. Compared to lab settings where stereotypes are activated on a subliminal level, there may be multiple factors competing for the control of behavior when stereotypes are presented as objects, which may lessen the effect of stereotype activation on behavior.     

An experimental,video-based investigation into the motivating impact of choice and positive feedback among students with different motor competence levels

ABSTRACT

Background: Research stemming from Self-Determination Theory (SDT) shows that physical education (PE) teachers who endorse an autonomy-supportive and structuring motivating style positively affect students’ motivation, engagement and learning. Choice provision and positive feedback are two concrete strategies that are part of an autonomy-supportive and structuring style, respectively. While the benefits of choice provision and positive feedback have been shown in contexts other than PE, evidence in the specific context of PE is much scarcer. Grounded in SDT and relying on experimental design, the present study sought to examine the effects of choice provision and positive feedback on students’ motivational experiences in PE, and whether these effects were moderated by students’ actual motor competence (AMC).

Method: A sample of 277 students (41% boys, Mage?=?12.78 years) was randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions (2?×?2 design). Prior to the experimental manipulation, participants’ AMC was measured with the Test of Gross Motor Development second edition. Participants then watched a videotaped PE lesson, in which the provision of choice (choice – no choice) and type of feedback (corrective feedback – positive and corrective feedback) were manipulated. Participants were asked to imagine how they would feel being a student in the displayed lessons. After watching the video, they completed validated questionnaires on their (1) anticipated need satisfaction and frustration and (2) autonomous and controlled motivation. MANOVAs were conducted to investigate the differences between the experimental groups in terms of anticipated need satisfaction, need frustration and motivation. Multiple linear regression analyses were used to examine the potential moderating role of AMC.

Findings and conclusions: The benefits of choice provision were clearly shown with students in the choice condition anticipating significantly more autonomy, competence and relatedness satisfaction and autonomous motivation, while they anticipated significantly less autonomy and relatedness frustration when compared to students in the no choice condition. Similarly, the addition of positive feedback to corrective feedback yielded clear benefits, with lower averages in anticipated need frustration found among students who watched the videos in which positive feedback was added to corrective feedback. No support was provided for a synergetic motivational effect between choice and positive feedback. Overall, the present findings show the importance of offering choice and providing positive feedback to motivate students in PE, with positive effects being present for all students independent of their initial AMC levels. Although few interaction effects were found, lowly motor competent students benefited even more from receiving positive feedback than highly motor competent students. The findings of this study are important to take into account in PE teacher education programs and professional training programs for PE teachers about how to teach in a (more) motivating way.     

Finger-writing intervention impacts the spelling and handwriting skills of children with developmental language disorder: a multiple single-case study

Learning to use grapheme to phoneme correspondences (GPCs) provides a powerful mechanism for the foundation of reading skills in children. However, for some children, such as those with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), the GPC learning process takes time, is laborious, and impacts the entire reading and spelling processes. The present study aims to demonstrate the effectiveness of a finger-writing intervention on reading, spelling and handwriting performances. A visuomotor support was designed to help them to learn more efficiently GPCs since children with DLD appear to have altered phonological representations in memory. Over a period of two months, five children with DLD from a special primary school (aged from 7.42 years to 10.17 years) received individually either a finger-writing intervention or a control intervention, both focusing on phonological awareness and the learning of specific GPCs. In the finger-writing intervention, the child had to explore with their fingers the shape of relief-graphemes and excavated-letter. In the control intervention, the same exercises were made except that the two finger-writing tasks were replaced by two visual discrimination tasks. Children were compared on several measures (reading, spelling, handwriting and phonological awareness) before and after the treatment. Results indicated that the children from the finger-writing intervention showed greater improvement than the children from the control group in learning GPCs to improve their graphemic spelling and, for two of the three children, in handwriting. These findings have a clear practical implication for teachers' instructional practices at school.     

ICT Inclusion and Gender: Tensions in Narratives of Network Engineer Training

Government, major information and communications technology (ICT) companies, and educational institutions in the United Kingdom currently claim that ICT skills training offers inclusion into the new economy. We focus on a private-public training initiative and its impact on the socially excluded, specifically lone women parents. Narrative data from four United Kingdom educational sites participating in this computer network engineer training program highlight a systemic paradox: that ICT skills development initiatives designed to support lone women parents are simultaneously working in opposition to broader policy goals such as work-life balance and ironically serve to reproduce the participants' classification as socially excluded. The assumptions underpinning the model of social inclusion driving the ICT skills training course are analyzed critically using the concepts of community of practice, classificatory systems, and marginalization. Our findings suggest that ICT training courses and initiatives should be accompanied by changes in pedagogic practice that accommodate the more wide-ranging needs of those targeted for inclusion, as well as changes in employment settings. We conclude by exploring the implications of this for government policy formation, business vendor qualifications, the design of ICT skills training initiatives, and our understanding of the role of ICT skills in overcoming the digital divide.     

What oral text reading fluency can reveal about reading comprehension

Text reading fluency – the ability to read quickly, accurately and with a natural intonation – has been proposed as a predictor of reading comprehension. In the current study, we examined the role of oral text reading fluency, defined as text reading rate and text reading prosody, as a contributor to reading comprehension outcomes in addition to decoding efficiency and language comprehension. One hundred and six Dutch primary school children from fourth grade participated in this study and were assessed on decoding efficiency, vocabulary, syntactic ability, reading fluency performance and reading comprehension skills. Regression analysis showed that text reading prosody, not text reading rate, explained additional variance in reading comprehension performance when decoding efficiency and language comprehension were controlled for. This result suggests that the inclusion of text reading prosody as an aspect of text reading fluency is justified and that a natural intonation is associated with better comprehension of what is read.     

Bidirectional Relations Between Text Reading Prosody and Reading Comprehension in the Upper Primary School Grades: A Longitudinal Perspective

The purpose of this study was to examine the directionality of the relationship between text reading prosody and reading comprehension in the upper grades of primary school. We compared 3 theoretical possibilities: Two unidirectional relations from text reading prosody to reading comprehension and from reading comprehension to text reading prosody and a bidirectional relation between text reading prosody and reading comprehension. Further, we controlled for autoregressive effects and included decoding efficiency as a measure of general reading skill. Participants were 99 Dutch children, followed longitudinally, from 4th to 6th grade. Structural equation modeling showed that the bidirectional relation provided the best fitting model. In 5th grade, text reading prosody was related to prior decoding and reading comprehension, whereas in 6th grade, reading comprehension was related to prior text reading prosody. As such, the results suggest that the relation between text reading prosody and reading comprehension is reciprocal but dependent on grade level.