Reading difficulties and attention‐deficit/hyperactivity behaviours: evidence of an early association in a nonclinical sample

Attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often co‐occurs with reading disability. A cross‐sectional study in an Italian‐speaking, nonclinical sample was conducted in an attempt to document the existence of an early association between reading difficulties (RD) and ADHD behaviours. We recruited a sample of 369 children in their first year at primary school. Of the sample, 8.4% displayed RD; 7.0% had ADHD; 3.5% presented both RD and ADHD behaviours; 50% of the children with ADHD displayed RD; 41.9% of those with RD displayed ADHD behaviours. Low socioeconomic status was associated with a fourfold increased probability of displaying RD (odds ratio = 3.98), but not ADHD behaviours. In this nonclinical sample, we detected an early association between ADHD behaviours and RD. A key role in this association may be played by inattention symptoms, which occurred with significantly increased frequency also in the group presenting only RD.     

Teaching as a system: COVID-19 as a lens into teacher change

Educational Studies in Mathematics - In the spring of 2020, schools and universities around the world were closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The relative lockdown affected more than...     

Learning the rules of the game: The role of generic “you” and “we” in shaping children's interpretations of norms

A critical skill of childhood is learning social norms. We examine whether the generic pronouns “you” and “we,” which frame information as applying to people in general rather than to a specific individual, facilitate this process. In one pre-registered experiment conducted online between 2020 and 2021, children 4- to 9-year-old primarily living in the midwestern U.S. (N = 146, 75 girls, 71 boys, M_age = 7.14, SD = 1.69, 82% White) interpreted actions described with generic pronouns (vs. “I”) as normatively correct and selected the speaker who used generic pronouns as the rule-follower, particularly when generic pronouns were presented first. There were no significant effects of age. These results illustrate how generic pronouns influence how children discern unfamiliar norms and form interpersonal judgments.     

Continuing professional development: pedagogical practices of interprofessional simulation in health care

The increasing complexity of health care practice makes continuing professional development (CPD) essential for health care professionals. Simulation-based training is a CPD activity that is often applied to improve interprofessional collaboration and the quality of care. The aim of this study is to explore simulation as a pedagogical practice for the CPD of health care professionals. Specifically, the study focuses on how a professional development activity, the simulation, is enacted to support interprofessional collaboration and learning. A practice theory perspective is used as the theoretical framework. In this, the professional practice is conceptualised as being embodied, relational and situated in sociomaterial arrangements. Ten introduction and reflection sessions following interprofessional full-scale manikin-based simulations with professionals were video-recorded. The recordings were analysed following a stepwise qualitative collaborative approach developed for the purpose. The key findings suggest that the professional competence activity is enacted and interconnected with and governed by historical traditions of institutional teaching practices as well as simulation practices. Despite the intentions of team and interprofessional training, the institutional teaching and simulation practices constrain and hinder the intended outcomes of professional development in interprofessional collaboration.     

Supporting productive collaboration in a computer-supported instructional activity: peer-feedback on critical incidents in health care education

One important feature of vocational education is to provide students with solid conceptual knowledge along with substantial practical experience, acquired in school and workplace contexts, respectively. However, the research provided evidence that students do not spontaneously articulate the knowledge acquired in different contexts, and that specific instructional activities have to be designed and introduced. The present study deals with this type of activity conducted in a vocational school for health and social care assistants, which involved the use of collaborative writing about workplace critical incidents. The goal was to identify the patterns of interactions, and specifically the type of peer-feedback that engage students in productive collaboration. Qualitative analyses show that the writing productions could be categorized in four collaboration patterns differing in the level in which students would elaborate on their peers’ experience and profit from the peers’ suggestions in order to improve their understanding. On this basis, we propose a series of recommendations for implementing effective and instructionally relevant collaborative writing activities in vocational education.     

Facilitating Learning Events Through Example Generation

This study deals with the initial understanding that advanced undergraduate mathematics students exhibit when presented with a new concept in an environment requiring self-generation and self-validation of instances of the concept. Data were collected in spring of 1995 through interviews with 11 third and fourth year undergraduate mathematics students. We discuss the data from the perspective of the student's concept image and introduce the notion of learning event to indicate when a student communicates and applies a new understanding of a concept. We infer that the students in our study who employed an example generation learning strategy were more effective in attaining an initial understanding of the new concept than those who primarily employed other learning strategies such as definition reformulation or memorization.This revised version was published online in September 2005 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Motor variability in sports: A non-linear analysis of race walking

Abstract

This aim of this study was to analyse the nature of movement variability and to assess whether entropy measures may represent a valuable synthetic index of neuromuscular organization. The regularity of kinematic/kinetic time series during race walking, the changes in the structure of intra-individual variability over the test session, and the influence of athletic skill in (inter)national rank athletes were investigated. Motion analysis techniques were used. Sample entropy (SampEn) was adopted to examine fluctuations in lower limb angles and ground reaction forces. The regularity of both original and surrogate time series was assessed and compared, by estimating SampEn, to verify the presence of non-linear features in movement variability. SampEn was statistically lower in the original data than in surrogates. In contrast, the regularity of time series did not change significantly throughout the subsequent intra-individual repetitions. Hip and ankle joint angles and vertical ground reaction force manifested increased entropy for skilled athletes. Results suggest that race walking variability was not only the product of random noise but also contained information about the inherent propriety of the neuro-musculo-skeletal system. Furthermore, they provide some indications about neuromuscular control of the lower limb joints during race walking gait, and about the differences between more and less skilled individuals.