Effect of attending to a ball during a side-cut maneuver on lower extremity biomechanics in male and female athletes

Many sports associated with anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury require athletes attend to a ball during participation. We investigated effects of attending to a ball on lower extremity mechanics during a side-cut maneuver and if these effects are consistent for males and females. Sagittal and frontal plane hip and knee kinematics and joint moments were measured during side-cut maneuvers in 19 male and 19 female National Collegiate Athletic Association division III basketball players. Participants also experienced two side-cut conditions that required attention to a ball. Our results did not indicate that the effect of attention varies with gender. However, during side-cut conditions while attending to a ball, internal knee adductor moment was 20% greater (p = 0.03) and peak knee flexion angle was 4° larger (p < 0.01). Females demonstrated 5° less hip flexion (p = 0.046), 12° less knee flexion (p < 0.01), and 4° more knee abduction (p = 0.026) at initial contact during all side-cut conditions than males. Attention to a ball may affect lower extremity mechanics relevant to ACL injury. The validity of laboratory studies of lower extremity mechanics for sports that include attention to a ball may be increased if participants are required to attend to a ball during the task.     

Design and Reflection Help Students Develop Scientific Abilities: Learning in Introductory Physics Laboratories

Design activities, when embedded in an inquiry cycle and appropriately scaffolded and supplemented with reflection, can promote the development of the habits of mind (scientific abilities) that are an important part of scientific practice. Through the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE), students construct physics knowledge by engaging in inquiry cycles that replicate the approach used by physicists to construct knowledge. A significant portion of student learning occurs in ISLE instructional labs where students design their own experiments. The labs provide an environment for cognitive apprenticeship enhanced by formative assessment. As a result, students develop interpretive knowing that helps them approach new problems as scientists. This article describes a classroom study in which the students in the ISLE design lab performed equally well on traditional exams as ISLE students who did not engage in design activities. However, the design group significantly outperformed the non-design group while working on novel experimental tasks (in physics and biology), demonstrating the application of scientific abilities to an inquiry task in a novel content domain. This research shows that a learning environment that integrates cognitive apprenticeship and formative assessment in a series of conceptual design tasks provides a rich context for helping students build scientific habits of mind.     

Social Categorization and the Formation of Intergroup Attitudes in Children

The study was designed to test several hypotheses derived from intergroup theory concerning the effects of the presence of a novel social category on the formation of intergroup attitudes. Elementary school children (N = 61; aged 6–9) were given measures of classification skill and self-esteem and assigned to 1 of 3 types of school classrooms in which teachers made: (1) functional use of "blue" and "yellow" groups assigned on the basis of a biological attribute, (2) functional use of "blue" and "yellow" groups assigned on the basis of a random drawing, or (3) no explicit groups (despite the presence of blue and yellow groups). After 4 weeks, children completed measures of intergroup attitudes and behavior. As predicted, the functional use of color groups affected children's attitudes toward group members, with children showing consistent biases favoring their own group. Children with higher levels of self-esteem showed higher levels of intergroup stereotyping.     

The role of counselors serving deaf or hard of hearing students in public schools

Since enactment of Public Law 94-142, residential schools for d/Deaf or hard of hearing (d/Dhh) students have lost enrollment to public schools. Public school counselors now must meet d/Dhh students' counseling needs. There is little literature on if and how counselors are doing this. The present study used a survey to evaluate the job satisfaction and expectations of 22 counselors working with d/Dhh students in programs across the United States. Follow-up interviews were conducted with 6 participants functioning as counselors for d/Dhh students. Results indicated that the counselors were generally pleased with their role, which, however, diverged markedly from the American School Counselor Association (2003) national model. The interviews revealed 5 themes that may be unique to counselors serving d/Dhh students in public schools: Authority Based on Experience, Director     

Sovereignty, Globalism, and Information Flow in Complex Emergencies

Because of rapid developments in information technology, abuses of sovereignty by authoritarian governments have received much publicity in recent years, raising public consciousness of massive human rights violations to new levels. Contributing to the dialogue on the influence of information technology on social systems, this article explores (1) the contested role of information in disaster relief efforts, (2) the clash of political and social values emerging from the use of information within the international community's involvement in high-profile crises, such as those in Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda, and (3) the resultant rethinking of government's power within national borders, sovereignty. With life-anddeath stakes, international affirmation of a free flow of information during disasters is emerging as a global human rights mandate.     

Examining Interprofessional Education Through the Lens of Interdisciplinarity: Power,Knowledge and New Ontological Subjects

Interprofessional education (IPE) – students of different professions learning together, from and about each other – is increasingly common in health professional degrees. Despite its explicit aims of transforming identities, practices and relationships within/across health professions, IPE remains under-theorised sociologically, with most IPE scholarship focussed on evaluating specific interventions. In particular, the significance of a shared knowledge base for shaping professional power and subjectivity in IPE has been overlooked. In this paper we begin to develop a framework for theorising IPE in allied health, by drawing parallels with a cognate area in which there has already been fruitful conceptual development: interdisciplinarity. Specifically, we offer a worked example of how the two areas may be brought into dialogue, by deploying Barry, Born and Weszkalnys’ (2008) conceptualisation of interdisciplinarity as a lens for understanding IPE. Following Barry et al. (2008) we delineate a number of ‘modes’ and ‘logics’ of knowledge-production that emerge both in IPE literature and in our own empirical study of IPE. Our empirical data are drawn from 32 semi-structured interviews with 19 allied health students participating in an IPE curriculum at one Australian university. Findings point to the emergence of interprofessional practitioner identities among students that have the potential to undermine traditional epistemological boundaries and transcend role-based distinctions in future health profession(al)s. We argue that Barry et al.’s ‘logic of ontology’ sheds light on previously unidentified processes of transformation within IPE, and offers a theoretical framework that can explain the importance of a shared pan-professional knowledge base for the reflexive individual construction of new interprofessional ontological subjects.     

The Boy-Child in Australian Lesbian Feminist Discourse and Community

With the development of second wave feminism and the emergence of an increasingly visible and articulate community of lesbians within feminist circles in the 1970s, an influential strand of radical feminism began to advocate separatism as a political strategy for lesbians. Simultaneously, the Australian women’s movement was opening up a space in which it was possible to acknowledge the dual role of some women as lesbians and as mothers, and a small minority of lesbians were using artificial insemination and other methods to conceive children in the context of lesbian relationships. The co-existence of these two strands of lesbian feminist thought gave rise to a new issue: that of the place of the boy-child in lesbian feminist ideology and communities. Drawing on oral history interviews and archival research, this article explores the debate about boy children in Australian lesbian feminist circles in the 1970s and 1980s. A range of views were expressed, from the suggestion that boy children presented an opportunity to raise a new generation of pro-feminist men, to the view that the boy child threatened women’s autonomy and need for sisterhood. This article traces the development of these arguments and considers the impact of the debate on the mothers of boys, their boy-children and the broader lesbian feminist community.     

The early entrance option: Academic and social/emotional outcomes

This review examines how early kindergarten entrants fare academically and socially/emotionally in their schooling. In general, the literature is pessimistic about academic achievement and social/emotional adjustment of early entrants. The exception to this seems to be when screening procedures are required to identify children with exceptional ability and to eliminate from early entrance children likely to have adjustment difficulties. Typically, the screening battery includes measurements of academic readiness, social/emotional maturity, and a physical examination, followed by a trial entrance period. Much additional research is needed to identify variables that will add significantly in predicting future school success of early entrants. However, rather than predicting which children will fit the educational system, a more effective use of educational research would be investigation into developing educational programs that are flexible in meeting the needs of each child.     

The Impact of Three-Dimensional Printed Anatomical Models on First-Year Student Engagement in a Block Mode Delivery

Student engagement is known to have several positive effects on learning outcomes and can impact a student's university experience. High levels of engagement in content-heavy subjects can be difficult to attain. Due to a major institutional restructure, the anatomy prosection laboratory time per subject was dramatically reduced. In response, the authors set out to redesign their anatomy units with a focus on engaging the learning activities that would increase time-on-task both within and outside of the classroom. One of these curriculum changes was the implementation of a suite of anatomy learning activities centered on sets of three-dimensional printed upper limb skeleton models. A two-part mixed-method sequential exploratory design was used to evaluate these activities. Part one was a questionnaire that evaluated the students' engagement with and perceptions of the models. Part two involved focus groups interviews, which were an extension of the survey questions in part one. The results of the study indicated that the majority of students found the models to be an engaging resource that helped improve their study habits. As a result, students strongly felt that the use of the models inspired greater academic confidence and overall better performance in their assessments. Overall, the models were an effective way of increasing the engagement and deep learning, and reinforced previous findings from the medical education research. Future research should investigate the effects of these models on student's grades within osteopathy and other allied health courses.     

Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Reading Interventions for Students in the Primary Grades

Abstract

This meta-analysis systematically reviewed the most up-to-date literature to determine the effectiveness of reading interventions on measures of word and pseudoword reading, reading comprehension, and passage fluency, and to determine the role intervention and study variables play in moderating the impacts for students at risk for reading difficulties in Grades 1–3. We used random-effects meta-regression models with robust variance estimates to summarize overall effects and to explore potential moderator effects. Results from a total of 33 rigorous experimental and quasi-experimental studies conducted between 2002 and 2017 that met WWC evidence standards revealed a significant positive effect for reading interventions on reading outcomes, with a mean effect size of 0.39 (SE = .04, p < .001, 95% CI [0.32, 0.46]). Moderator analyses demonstrated that mean effects varied across outcome domains and areas of instruction.