Young weightlifters' performance across time

Prestigious professional organisations have questioned the efficacy of resistive training by children or have often neglected to address weightlifting in their position papers on resistive training for children. The purpose of this paper was to address the deficit in data regarding the efficacy of training children for weightlifting and to report data regarding to safety in this population. Eleven subjects (3 female, 8 male) who had trained at the USA Weightlifting Development Centre in Shreveport Louisiana for a minimum of 22 months (mean = 28.8; SD +/- 4.4) served as subjects for this study. Means for the pool of subjects subjected to t-test to compare data obtained at each subject's initial competition with that obtained at the individual's most recent competition revealed significant positive changes in body weight, snatch weight, clean and jerk weight, and total weight lifted. The latter three were significant both in absolute weight and in weight lifted per kg of body weight. Total weight lifted at competitions plotted separately for boys and for girls across time indicated an apparently steeper slope of improvement for boys. The latter were not tested for significance because of the small sample sizes. The lack of injury in training and in 534 competitive lifts was discussed. None required medical attention or loss of training time. It was concluded that there can be no doubt regarding the efficacy of weightlifting as carried out at the USA Weightlifting Development Centre. The importance of proper application of scientific theory of conditioning in a conservative manner for this population was emphasised.     

新一代流行乐之王

At the Butcher Shop, a steakhouse in downtown Memphis, a banquet-size table is crowded with people who are all somehow asso-ciated with Justin Timberlake: his mother and stepfather, Lynn and Paul Harless (who co-manage his career), his best friend's girlfriend, his publicist, some family friends, business asso-ciates, me. We pass our time laughing and drinking wine and eating filet (鱼片) mignon and twice-baked potatoes, but we're really just waiting     

爱:最神奇的力量

一位大学教授在他的社会学课堂上,让他的学生去巴尔迪摩贫民窟找到两百个男孩的记录,并且要对每个男孩的未来做出评估.学生们给每个孩子的评价都是:“这辈子根本没有机会翻身了.”二十五年后,另外一个社会学教授发现了这个早期做过的社会调查.于是他让自己的学生继续探究这个课题,看看当初那些小男孩现在到底怎么样了.     

Ten Salient Practices of Undergraduate Research Mentors: A Review of the Literature

This paper identifies salient practices of faculty mentors of undergraduate research (UR) as indicated in the extensive literature of the past two decades on UR. The well-established benefits for students involved in UR are dependent, first and foremost, on high-quality mentoring. Mentorship is a defining feature of UR. As more and different types of colleges and universities strive to meet student demand for authentic scholarly experiences, it is imperative to identify what effective UR mentors do in order to ensure student engagement, quality enhancement, retention, and degree-completion. We offer an original analysis of the literature on UR mentoring in which we identify 10 significant “lessons learned,” or evidence-based practices of effective UR mentors that apply broadly across disciplines, students, institutions, and mentoring approaches.     

How students reason about matter flows and accumulations in complex biological phenomena: An emerging learning progression for mass balance

In recent years, there has been a strong push to transform STEM education at K-12 and collegiate levels to help students learn to think like scientists. One aspect of this transformation involves redesigning instruction and curricula around fundamental scientific ideas that serve as conceptual scaffolds students can use to build cohesive knowledge structures. In this study, we investigated how students use mass balance reasoning as a conceptual scaffold to gain a deeper understanding of how matter moves through biological systems. Our aim was to lay the groundwork for a mass balance learning progression in physiology. We drew on a general models framework from biology and a covariational reasoning framework from math education to interpret students' mass balance ideas. We used a constant comparative method to identify students' reasoning patterns from 73 interviews conducted with undergraduate biology students. We helped validate the reasoning patterns identified with >8000 written responses collected from students at multiple institutions. From our analyses, we identified two related progress variables that describe key elements of students' performances: the first describes how students identify and use matter flows in biology phenomena; the second characterizes how students use net rate-of-change to predict how matter accumulates in, or disperses from, a compartment. We also present a case study of how we used our emerging mass balance learning progression to inform instructional practices to support students' mass balance reasoning. Our progress variables describe one way students engage in three dimensional learning by showing how student performances associated with the practice of mathematical thinking reveal their understanding of the core concept of matter flows as governed by the crosscutting concept of matter conservation. Though our work is situated in physiology, it extends previous work in climate change education and is applicable to other scientific fields, such as physics, engineering, and geochemistry.     

Doing good while performing well at Flemish universities: benchmarking higher education institutions in terms of social inclusion and market performance

Universities, and higher education institutions in general, are ever more influenced by output-driven performance indicators and models that originally stem from the profit-organisational context. As a result, universities are increasingly considering management tools that support them in the (decision) process for attaining their strategic goals. The growth-share matrix is one of these tools that has proven its value in diverse business and competitive contexts in the past few decades. The present study’s contribution is twofold. First, we apply and interpret the growth-share matrix as part of a strategic positioning analysis in a strategic university context. Second, we extend this tool by incorporating social inclusion as a third dimension in the analysis. In recent years, discussions on the rising social disparity among adolescents in higher education have increased and different types of actors have raised the motivation to create more equal opportunities for prospective students who rank among the group of socially disadvantaged adolescents. The findings of an empirical case of the proposed model for a particular Belgian academic programme show that increased social inclusion and higher performance parameters, such as growth in student enrolments and diplomas, can be reached simultaneously.     

Innovation and technical change: A case study of the U.K. tractor industry, 1957 1977

In previous work it was established that the U.K. tractor industry was characterised by a high degree of technical change and that this was brought about by a process of more or less continuous incremental innovation. What was lacking was an analysis of how much technical change had been introduced and an indication of the role played by technical change in determining the performance of the U.K. tractor industry internationally. This paper concludes that on the average technical change in the industry had increased by as much as 150 percent during the years 1959–1977, though there is some indication that the rate of change might now be slowing somewhat.In order to determine the relative importance of technical change a method was developed to operationalise the distinction between price and non-price competition as well as the idea of intrinsic (technical) and associative (non-technical) factors as constituents of the latter. Based on cross-sectional data for the year 1978, it has been possible to show that British manufacturers tend to produce moderately priced tractors of low to medium technical sophistication: that German manufacturers produced the most technically sophisticated tractors; that the Italian manufacturers are not generally more sophisticated, technically, than the British producers except with respect to their development of four-wheel drive; and that COMECON-based producers combine a very low price with some degree of technical sophistication. Finally, it has been possible to show that the tractors with the highest sales are among the less sophisticated in each of the power ranges investigated and that new entrants used technical sophistication as an element of their entry strategy. The answer to the question of what allows the market leader to be market leader required the development of measures for associative non-price factors, such as the availability of a dealer network brand loyalty, resale prices of tractor models, etc. By performing a regression analysis on these measures along with previously derived measures of quality-adjusted price and relative technical sophistication it has been possible to show that market leadership is achieved as a result of a balance of a number of factors, the most important of which are the size of the dealer network, warrants cost, advertising, technical sophistication and price.     

SimPharm: How pharmacy students made meaning of a clinical case differently in paper‐ and simulation‐based workshops

Several scholars contend that learning with computer games and simulations results in students thinking more like professionals. Bearing this goal in mind, we investigated how a group of pharmacy students learnt with an in‐house developed computer simulation, SimPharm. Adopting situated cognition as our theoretical lens, we conducted a case study involving 20 undergraduate students to tease out how they made meaning of a clinical case differently in two different contexts: a typical paper‐based workshop and one enabled by SimPharm. The data collected included audio recordings of classroom discourse, focus group interviews and class observations. The findings identified differences in four areas: framing of the problem; problem‐solving steps and tools used; sources and meaning of feedback; and conceptualisation of the patient. These four areas can serve as axes along which future evaluations of educational simulations can be carried out based on their affordances.     

The influence of formal and informal formative pre‐service experiences on teacher self‐efficacy

Formal pre‐service training has been shown to be effective in building teacher self‐efficacy beliefs. However, the impact of other, less formal, ‘teacher‐like’ pre‐service experiences on the formation of efficacy beliefs has not previously been investigated. This study examines the associations between both formal and informal formative pre‐service experiences and teacher self‐efficacy. In addition, the effect of years of teaching experience on these associations was investigated. Three hundred fifteen teachers of general and Judaic studies in Jewish day schools in the USA responded to a survey about their formal pre‐service experiences; informal experiences as youth advisors, camp counsellors and childcare supervisors; and two measures of teacher self‐efficacy. Formal pre‐service training and positive student‐teaching experiences, as well as each of the three informal experiences, were found to be associated with positive teacher self‐efficacy. Interestingly, formal and informal pre‐service experiences appear to be associated with different aspects of teacher self‐efficacy. Formal teacher training was most strongly associated with efficacy for instructional practices, while the positive informal experiences were most strongly associated with efficacy for student engagement. The potential impact of both formal and informal experiences did not appear to fade over time. On the contrary, for those variables where an interaction with years of teaching was detected, it was the efficacy beliefs of the most senior teachers that were most related to their pre‐service experiences. These findings have important implications for the practice of both teacher trainers and those charged with recruiting and supporting teachers.