Academic development as cultural work: responding to the organizational complexity of modern higher education institutions

Modern universities are increasingly fragmented due to increased professionalization and specialisation, which add to the complexity of academic development work. This situation warrants initiatives and actions that can facilitate a more collective, collaborative orientation among staff and students. Consequently, this article reflects on the factors driving the fragmentation of universities, the increasing tensions associated with this tendency, and the potential role academic developers may play to negotiate different interests that arise as a result. Cultural work is identified as a potential concept for academic developers to explore; attention to it can help them to maintain relevance within the university and adapt to future changes.     

Heart rate and movement pattern in street soccer for homeless women

Street soccer has been shown to be effective in improving cardiovascular and musculoskeletal fitness in homeless men, due to high heart rate (HR) and multiple intense actions. The purpose of this study was to investigate HR, movement pattern, rating of perceived exertion (RPE), flow and worry during street soccer for homeless women. Fifteen homeless women (30.3?±?5.0?years [± standard deviation, SD], 1.65?±?0.08?m, 65.1?±?11.0?kg, 5?±?4?years football experience) from three countries participated in 4?a-side street soccer games in Women’s Homeless World Cup 2015. Mean and peak HR were 174?±?7 and 188?±?10?beats per minute (bpm), respectively, and >160 bpm 76?±?23% of the playing time (11.1?±?2.6?min). Distance covered per minute was 68.6?±?8.9?m of which 82?±?14, 15?±?6 and 3?±?3% were covered with low- (0–9?km/h), moderate- (9–13?km/h) and high-speed (>13?km/h) running, respectively. The 43?±?5, 45?±?3 and 12?±?3% of the distance were covered running forward, sideways, and backward, respectively. Player Load was 9.2?±?1.7?arbitrary units (AU) per minute and the number of accelerations >1.5?ms^–2 was 15.3?±?2.7 per minute. The score for flow was high (5.5?±?0.8), whereas rating of perceived exertion (RPE) values (4.8?±?2.5) and the score for worry (4.6?±?1.3) were moderate. Street soccer for homeless women elicits high HR and a movement pattern comparable and for some parameters even higher than street soccer and recreational football for homeless and untrained men. Street soccer may be a suitable training intervention for homeless women, and especially moderate RPE and high flow score speaks in favour of an expectation of high participation and adherence.     

Effects of the Nordic Hamstring exercise on sprint capacity in male football players: a randomized controlled trial

This assessor-blinded, randomized controlled superiority trial investigated the efficacy of the 10-week Nordic Hamstring exercise (NHE) protocol on sprint performance in football players.

Thirty-five amateur male players (age: 17–26 years) were randomized to a do-as-usual control group (CG; n = 17) or to 10-weeks of supervised strength training using the NHE in-season (IG; n = 18). A repeated-sprint test, consisting of 4 × 6 10 m sprints, with 15 s recovery period between sprints and 180 s between sets, was conducted to evaluate total sprint time as the primary outcome. Secondary outcomes were best 10 m sprint time (10mST) and sprint time during the last sprint (L10mST). Additionally, peak eccentric hamstring strength (ECC-P_HS) and eccentric hamstring strength capacity (ECC-CAP_HS) were measured during the NHE.

Ten players were lost to follow-up, thus 25 players were analyzed (CG n = 14; IG n = 11). Between-group differences in mean changes were observed in favor of the IG for sprint performance outcomes; TST (?0.649 s, p = 0.056, d = 0.38), 10mST (?0.047 s, p = 0.005, d = 0.64) and L10mST (?0.052 s, p = 0.094, d = 0.59), and for strength outcomes; ECC-P_HS (62.3 N, p = 0.006, d = 0.92), and ECC-CAP_HS (951 N, p = 0.005, d = 0.95).

In conclusion, the NHE showed small-to-medium improvements in sprint performance and large increases in peak eccentric hamstring strength and capacity.

Trial Registration Number: NCT02674919     

Locality-adapted kernel densities of term co-occurrences for location prediction of tweets

While geographical metadata referring to the originating locations of tweets provides valuable information to perform effective spatial analysis in social networks, scarcity of such geotagged tweets imposes limitations on their usability. In this work, we propose a content-based location prediction method for tweets by analyzing the geographical distribution of tweet texts using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE). The primary novelty of our work is to determine different settings of kernel functions for every term in tweets based on the location indicativeness of these terms. Our proposed method, which we call locality-adapted KDE, uses information-theoretic metrics and does not require any parameter tuning for these settings. As a further enhancement on the term-level distribution model, we describe an analysis of spatial point patterns in tweet texts in order to identify bigrams that exhibit significant deviation from the underlying unigram patterns. We present an expansion of feature space using the selected bigrams and show that it eventually yields further improvement in prediction accuracy of our locality-adapted KDE. We demonstrate that our expansion results in a limited increase in the size of feature space and it does not hinder online localization of tweets. The methods we propose rely purely on statistical approaches without requiring any language-specific setting. Experiments conducted on three tweet sets from different countries show that our proposed solution outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques, yielding significantly more accurate predictions.     

Teachers’ potential to promote students’ deeper learning in whole-class teaching: An observation study in Norwegian classrooms

Journal of Educational Change - Teachers worldwide are challenged to adjust their teaching to meet students’ needs for deeper learning. The lack of mutual understanding among researchers,...     

Representations of student performance data in local education policy

Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability - The use of data for governance purposes has been widely recognised as a way for national authorities to coordinate their activities across...     

Correction to: Teaching and learning in a multilingual Europe: findings from a cross-European study

European Journal of Psychology of Education - A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-021-00539-z