Target Setting in Schools for Children with Severe Learning Difficulties: Headteachers' Perceptions

Dawn Male, Lecturer in Psychology and Special Needs at the Institute of Education, University of London, reports on headteachers' perceptions of the advantages of target setting and their concerns about its implementation.     

The developmental and professional activities of female international soccer players from five high-performing nations

ABSTRACT

We study the developmental and professional activities engaged in by 86 female adult soccer players from the senior national teams of Australia, Canada, England, Sweden, and the United States of America. Players completed the Participation History Questionnaire (PHQ) to elicit the amount and type of activities engaged in across their developmental and professional years, including milestones, soccer-specific activity and engagement in other sport activity. Greater specialisation than diversification characterised their childhood developmental activities, including all players starting in soccer in childhood and accumulating more hours in soccer activity than other sports during this period. However, interindividual variation further characterised these childhood activities, with a proportion of players diversifying into other sports and/or soccer play to a greater or lesser degree during childhood when compared to the other players. The amount of coach-led soccer practice increased for all players across their development culminating in an average of 15–16 h/wk across a 40-week season in early adulthood. In contrast, the amount of engagement in other sports and soccer peer-led play varied between players but generally decreased across adolescence to negligible amounts in late adolescence. Findings are commensurate with the deliberate practice framework and early engagement.     

The American science pipeline: sustaining innovation in a time of economic crisis

Significant limitations have emerged in America's science training pipeline, including inaccessibility, inflexibility, financial limitations, and lack of diversity. We present three effective programs that collectively address these challenges. The programs are grounded in rigorous science and integrate through diverse disciplines across undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students, and resonate with the broader community. We discuss these models in the context of current economic constraints on higher education and the urgent need for our institutions to recruit and retain diverse student populations and sustain the successful American record in scientific education and innovation.     

Stimulating teachers' reflection and feedback asking: An interplay of self-efficacy,learning goal orientation,and transformational leadership

The goal of the study was to investigate how teachers' reflection and feedback asking – two crucial components of professional development – can be explained by occupational self-efficacy, learning goal orientation and transformational leadership. A survey study with data from 456 teachers from a Dutch College for Vocational Education and Training shows that occupational self-efficacy and learning goal orientation are positively related to reflection and feedback asking. Furthermore, learning goal orientation mediates the relationships between occupational self-efficacy and reflection and asking feedback. Finally, the positive relationship between transformational leadership and reflection and asking feedback appears to depend on learning goal orientation.     

Examining movement variability in the basketball free-throw action at different skill levels

The analysis of variability both within and between performers can reveal important information about how athletes satisfy situational constraints. Transitory changes in the basketball free-throw shot were examined across different stages in skill development. Six female basketball players were selected, representing a range of playing expertise (pretest: 0-90% baskets scored). Each participant was video recorded performing 30 shots. Contrary to predictions, there was not a clear pattern of a reduction in trajectory variability with increasing skill level. However, improvements in skill level were associated with an increasing amount of intertrial movement consistency from the elbow and wrist joints. It is suggested that the angular motions of the elbow and wrist joints were compensated for each other toward the end of each throw to adapt to subtle changes in release parameters of the ball.     

Global News VILLAGE: A case study explication of targeted tutorial development

The Global News VILLAGE (Virtual Information Literacy Learning and Growing Environment) is an online tutorial developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to help undergraduates learn how to use the library to find current information about global events and issues. Supporting the interdisciplinary Global Studies curriculum, the tutorial invites the learner to think critically about the products and practices of journalism. Through an introduction to concepts central to media literacy and information literacy, learners are provided with frameworks for understanding some of the political and economic factors that shape the news and are guided through the process of dissecting news stories to understand the perspective from which the stories frame events and issues.