Relationships between physical education (PE) teaching and student self-efficacy,aptitude to participate in PE and functional skills: with a special focus on students with disabilities

Background: Students with disability show an increasing incidence of school failure. Quality teaching and appropriate support may foster high self-efficacy, a predictive factor for successful school outcomes. Physical Education (PE) can provide students with a context in which self-efficacy and participation are promoted leading to improved academic achievement. The transition into secondary school can be challenging for many students with increased educational demands, developmental changes and individual social identification coinciding. A disability may add to the challenge of success.

Methods: Three groups of students, aged 13 years and enrolled in Swedish mainstream schools were targeted (n?=?439). Groups included students with 1. A diagnosed disability, 2. Low grades in PE (D–F) and 3. High grades (A–C) in PE. Questionnaires were collected and analyzed from 30/439 students with a diagnosed disability (physical, neuro-developmental and intellectual) from 26 classes, their classmates and their PE-teachers (n?=?25). Relationships between student self-reports and PE-teachers’ self-ratings were investigated. Also examined was the potential to which students’ functional skills could predict elevated general school self-efficacy, PE specific self-efficacy and aptitude to participate in PE. Results were compared with the total sample and between the three target groups (n?=?121).

Results: For students with disabilities, better self-rated teaching skills were related to lower student perceived general school self-efficacy, PE specific self-efficacy and aptitude to participate in PE. The impact of classroom climate in PE was more obvious among students with disabilities. Perceived functional skills were associated with elevated general school self-efficacy, PE specific self-efficacy and aptitude to participate in PE. Better socio-cognitive functional skills had an overall positive effect on all outcomes. Students with disabilities reported results similar to the total sample, the D–F group scored lower and the A–C group higher than the total sample and the disability group. Elevated self-efficacy in PE is six times less probable in students with disabilities, compared to the A–C group.

Conclusions: Our findings that better teacher planning and grading skills, are detrimental to students disadvantaged by disability is contradictive. Improving the establishment and communication of adapted learning standards at the transition to secondary school is a crucial and a predictive factor for promoting positive school experiences for students with disability. Students with disabilities need to be assured that the intended learning outcomes can be reached by doing activities differently than their typically functioning peers. Consideration of class composition is suggested as a means of promoting a positive learning climate, which would particularly benefit students with disabilities. Allocation of resources to support student socio-cognitive skills would improve experiences for the D–F group and likely promote a positive learning environment.     

Awareness of the backwash effect of assessment: A phenomenographic study of the views of Hong Kong and Swedish lecturers

An effective way to change student learning is to change the form of assessment. This has become known as the backwash effect of assessment. However, academic teachers ways of understanding the role of assessment in student learning are also important. This paper reports a phenomenographic study of the views of the role of assessment amongst Swedish and Hong Kong university teachers. The results are described in eight categories of conceptions, placed within a two-dimensional outcome space. The two dimensions are (1) the relation between teaching and assessment, and (2) the focus of the backwash effect. The results indicate that two features of the described conceptions are critical for changing teachers views of the role of assessment. One is the way one understands the significance of basic knowledge in ones discipline while the other is whether one looks upon the relation between teaching and assessment as being of an internal or external nature. As much research literature points out, to bring about changes in approaches to teaching and learning you must first bring about changes in conceptions of teaching and learning. To utilize assessment to improve student learning, teachers need to be made aware of the need of such improvement and of the role assessment can play in this process. On the basis of research such as that reported in this paper, staff developers could develop workshops or other strategies, which can accomplish this task.     

Support and opposition in an attempted higher education merger

Tertiary Education and Management - The study explores an ultimately unsuccessful merger of three Norwegian public university colleges. It shows how social practices of support for and opposition...     

Reflections on International Projects in Undergraduate CS Education

Educational methods race to keep pace with the opportunities afforded by technology, and in computer science we need methods that tie together the diverse aspects of the discipline and set them in a realistic human context. Projects have the potential to address various aims and perspectives, and international projects add new dimensions to student teamwork, requiring students to handle collaboration that is remote, cross-cultural, and linguistically challenging. This paper examines some of the educational issues associated with international projects, in the discussion of two examples: PASTICS and Runestone.     

Research on school improvement in Scandinavia

In this selective review of research of school improvement in the Scandinavian countries — Denmark, Norway and Sweden — we use the definition of ‘school improvement’ first proposed by Miles and Ekholm [1985]. They state that school improvement is ‘a systematic, sustained effort aimed at change in learning conditions and other related conditions in one or more schools, with the ultimate aim of accomplishing educational goals more effectively’ [p. 48]. Using this definition, we focus on school improvement that occurs at the local level. We also focus on efforts that are planned and managed rather than those that are haphazard. We deal mainly with school improvement at the comprehensive level of the school system in the three countries.     

Organization and technology for the recording of science

Scientific research requires access to earlier research results. Over time a system supporting scientific exchange has evolved where publishers, libraries and archives each have well‐defined institutional roles. New information and communication technologies are challenging the established order for the recording of science and alternative systems are evolving. A strong commercial market for STI coupled with decreased purchasing power on the part of libraries makes organizational issues as important as technological ones.     

Discourses about School-based Mathematics Teacher Education in Finland and Sweden

In this cross-case study we focus on school-based teacher education in Sweden and Finland. Through the use of focus-group interviews with mathematics teacher educators in Finland and Sweden, the study shows that there are substantial differences in how school-based teacher education is introduced and portrayed in the discourse about teacher education and prospective teachers' learning. The school-based teacher education among the Finnish groups is made relevant in relation to several aspects of prospective teachers' learning. In the Swedish groups, school-based teacher education is portrayed as an organizational problem and few aspects of prospective teachers' learning are brought into the discourse. The results cannot be generalized to the two countries but show interesting conceptualizations of school-based education potentially useful for teacher educators and scholars.     

Ethics or Morals: Understanding Students’ Values Related to Genetic Tests on Humans

To make meaning of scientific knowledge in such a way that concepts and values of the life-world are not threatened is difficult for students and laymen. Ethics and morals pertaining to the use of genetic tests for hereditary diseases have been investigated and discussed by educators, anthropologists, medical doctors and philosophers giving, at least in part, diverging results. This study investigates how students explain and understand their argumentation about dilemmas concerning gene testing for the purpose to reduce hereditary diseases. Thirteen students were interviewed about their views on this issue. Qualitative analysis was done primarily by relating students’ argumentation to their movements between ethics and morals as opposing poles. Students used either objective or subjective knowledge but had difficulties to integrate them. They tried to negotiate ethic arguments using utilitarian motives and medical knowledge with sympathy or irrational and personal arguments. They discussed the embryo’s moral status to decide if it was replaceable in a social group or not. The educational implications of the students’ use of knowledge in personal arguments are discussed.     

Measuring self-efficacy,aptitude to participate and functioning in students with and without impairments

Including vulnerable groups of students such as students with learning disabilities in mainstream school research, require ethical considerations and questionnaire adaptation. These students are often excluded, due to low understanding or methodologies generating inadequate data. Students with disability need be studied as a separate group and provided accessible questionnaires. This pilot study aims at developing and evaluating student self-reported measures, rating aspects of student experiences of school-based Physical Education (PE). Instrument design, reliability and validity were examined in Swedish secondary school students (n = 47) including students, aged 13, with intellectual disability (n = 5) and without impairment and test–retested on 28 of these students. Psychometric results from the small pilot-study sample were confirmed in analyses based on replies from the first wave of data collection in the main study (n = 450). Results show adequate internal consistency, factor structure and relations between measures. In conclusion, reliability and validity were satisfactory in scales to measure self-efficacy in general, in PE, and aptitude to participate. Adapting proxy ratings for functioning into self-reports indicated problems. Adequacy of adjustments made were confirmed and a dichotomous scale for typical/atypical function is suggested for further analyses.     

No project is an island: linking projects to history and context

Theories on project management are dominated by a perspective on singular projects, treating the unit of analysis as a lonely phenomenon. Anchored in a comparative case study, this paper discusses how the interior processes of a project are influenced by its historical and organizational context. The paper illustrates how the structures and procedures employed in a project have to be understood in relation to previous and simultaneous courses of activity, to future plans, and to standard operating procedures, traditions, and the norms of its surroundings. The findings suggest that future research on project management needs to extend its temporal scope, analyzing how project practices evolve through history over prior, present, and future projects, as well as its organizational scope, analyzing how project practices relate to long-term institutions as well as simultaneous activities in its environment.