The relationship between evaluative concerns and sport competition state anxiety among youth skiers

Thirty-four youth competitive skiers (mean age = 13.74 years) completed measures of social evaluative concern and competitive anxiety. Consistent with past research, regression analyses showed that cognitive anxiety was related to performance-specific evaluative concerns. However, contrary to current conceptualizations of sport competition anxiety, somatic anxiety was correlated with concerns about evaluation of other non-performance aspects of ski racing. Competitive skiers were most concerned about parents' and friends' evaluations of their performance, and other competitors' and friends' evaluations of their skiing in general. These findings are discussed in relation to the theory and management of sport competition state anxiety.     

Concentrated Poverty and Urban School Reform: “The Choice is Yours” in Minneapolis

The subject of urban schools has received extensive scholarly and popular attention in recent years, and a wide variety of policies to address the problem of low educational achievement has been suggested. This article, based on an analysis of documents and reports, in-depth interviews, and a variety of secondary sources, examines the first several years of the implementation of a 2000 legal settlement between the Minneapolis Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the State of Minnesota regarding the Minneapolis schools. Influenced by the Sheff v. O'Neill (1996) case in Hartford, Connecticut, the Minneapolis NAACP's lawsuit challenged the State's oversight of the Minneapolis schools under the Minnesota Constitution. The settlement created two new programs intended to provide low-income Minneapolis students more options in selecting schools. This article focuses on the more wide-ranging of these two programs, which buses up to 2,000 low-income urban students annually to suburban Minneapolis schools at State expense. The creation of the suburban transfer program represents a legal and political victory for the NAACP and its supporters. Yet the transfer program highlights the many obstacles faced by low-income students and reinforces the necessity for a multi-dimensional approach to high-poverty urban schools.     

Holocaust Memorial Day in schools - context,process and content: a review of research into Holocaust education

The Holocaust was officially remembered in Britain for the first time on 27 January 2001. This is to be an annual event and it is intended that it will provide a focus for work in schools. The paper reviews the findings of research into Holocaust education and discusses the implications for teachers intending to respond to this important initiative.     

‘Teaching’ the path towards university: understanding student access through storied-futures and meritocratic grand narratives

The notion that the stories of our lives shape dispositions towards imagined futures is another lens through which university underrepresentation should be viewed. A storied lens attends to how futures, like university attendance, are storied during childhood to the extent that some youth imagine, and therefore plan, these futures as natural progression. Such was the case for study participants, indicating that childhood stories contain answers for mitigating social reproduction connected to parental education and cultural forces within the home. Examining social mobility through the underexplored storied-futures grand narrative presents unique solutions that lay hidden within the dominant meritocratic grand narrative.     

TRAINING OLDER AND YOUNGER ADULTS TO USE SOFTWARE

Forty‐six subjects (22 young, 24 old) received three training sessions with software (Borland's “Sidekick"). Each session lasted a maximum of S h. The fourth session was a test. Subjects were randomly assigned to two learning environments, partnered or individual, and half were given a computer “jargon” sheet before training. All instructions were written, learning was self‐paced, and tasks were formulated according to discovery‐method guidelines. Attitudes toward computers were measured before Session 1 and on completion of Session 3. The results showed that older adults took twice as long as younger ones but achieved nearly equal performance levels, exceeding young adults in one condition but falling slightly below them in others. Older adults requested help two to three times as frequently. Session 3 attitude scores were positively correlated with the mark achieved on the final test, and changes in attitudes were related to training conditions.     

What traits do academics value in student writing? Insights from a psychometric approach

The number of students studying for university qualifications through the medium of English and for whom English is not their first language has increased significantly in recent years. This, along with efforts to widen access to those under-represented in higher education, has brought into focus the question of what academics see as constituting a ‘good’ piece of student writing. In this small-scale pilot study, Thurstone’s method of paired comparisons was used to establish a scale for ranking six essays in terms of how favourably each was viewed by academic lecturers when compared with every other essay in the set. Kelly’s repertory grid technique was subsequently applied to interviews conducted with the same lecturers to establish which traits they associated with the upper and lower end of the scale. Findings suggest that this methodology represents a promising approach to establishing what academic tutors regard as the key elements of good writing and thus provides an indication of what English teachers might fruitfully focus on in their teaching of the skill.