Tennis Shoes Required

Reform efforts to improve physical education often rely on facilitators to promote positive change. Although it is becoming more common, little is currently understood about the facilitation role. Our purpose was to examine facilitators' collective knowledge and experience with ongoing physical education professional development (PD), specifically regarding conceptions of their role in the process. Participants included 12 experienced PD facilitators. Data sources included formal semistructured and informal conversational interviews and participants' curriculum vitae. Results indicated that facilitators held common beliefs about teacher learning and self-identified actions aligned with those beliefs. Adhering to constructivist views of learning, facilitators underscored the role of prior knowledge and the active and social nature of learning. Their remarkably similar views emphasized multiple aspects of teacher capacity building.     

Broadening Readings of Sport Monuments: The Arthur Baynes Memorial Obelisk

Monuments to past and present sports performers are increasingly commonplace. Despite the potential for analyses of sports monuments to provide new and valuable insights into past and present sociocultural practices, studies of monuments and other forms of material culture have, until recently, received limited attention in sports historiography. In addition, new scholarship has tended to focus on sporting statues over other, non-figurative, monumental genres. This article will attempt to redress this relative neglect and contribute to a broadening discourse of sport, memory and materiality by analysing one particular sporting monument, a memorial obelisk erected in 1933 on the banks of the Brisbane River in Queensland, Australia to prominent 1920s sculler Arthur Alexander Baynes (1899–1932). The article examines Baynes' sporting career, considers his memorial within the context of obelisks and other commemorative monumental forms, and reads the memorial in its various discursive international, national, regional and local contexts. By providing a detailed analysis of this one ‘local’ sporting monument, the intention of this article is to add to the expanding literature on sporting material culture and, in particular, broaden our readings of sport monuments.     

School science achievement: Conditions for equality

Data are presented on the trend in sex differences in science achievement of the total population of 15 year old students in Western Australia over the period 1972‐85 inclusive. Since 1979 the science achievement of boys and girls has been approximately equal. This finding is attributed to the fact that, in Western Australia, at lower secondary school level, boys and girls are exposed to a common science curriculum for a common amount of instructional time. A discussion of the differential course taking hypothesis as an explanation for sex differences in science achievement found in other large‐scale studies is presented. Some evidence of the possible success of intervention strategies aimed at increasing the involvement of girls in science is given.     

Problem-Based Learning as an Effective Strategy for Science Teacher Professional Development

Abstract

The Problem-Based Learning (PBL) Project for Teachers included three days of professional development using PBL to deepen teachers’ content knowledge. Teachers identified the content area in which they wished to work from a list of choices. They worked in facilitated groups of from five to nine participants to solve rich, ill-structured problems. Content knowledge was assessed based on teachers’ written responses to at least one general question and one application question in which they explained some everyday phenomena. Teachers responded to these questions two months before and at the end of the professional development; 80.5 percent of the 41 middle and high school teachers who participated showed improved content knowledge. We also examined the patterns in teachers’ incoming content knowledge and changes in content knowledge. The data indicate that the PBL approach used here was effective in improving the content knowledge of teachers independent of demographic factors and type and degree of incoming content knowledge.     

Legal considerations concerning public support for private higher education

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CHILD AND STORY: THE LITERARY CONNECTION by Kay E. Vandergrift. New York: Neal‐Schuman Publishers, Inc., 1980. 340 pp.

THE HUMANITIES IN AMERICAN LIFE, Report of the Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1980. 205 pgs. $3.50 paperback, $12.50 cloth.

ON HIGHER EDUCATION: THE ACADEMIC ENTERPRISE IN AN ERA OF RISING STUDENT CONSUMERISM by David Riesman. San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass, 1980. xxxiv + 421 pp. $16.95.