Social Inclusion – Social Exclusion: Physical Exercise as Means Between Strengthening Individuals and Integration into Collectivities

Abstract

Physical exercise, beyond the mere physical aspect, is very much a social construct. But it is as well a means of constructing the social and as such it can be used in different ways. The contribution, taking a broad comparative perspective, will reflect on two major possibilities: the one may be called social inclusion as subordination and the other can be looked at as a matter of social inclusion by strengthening individuals. This also allows an understanding of new dangers of exclusion in the era of liquid modernity.     

A conceptual framework for understanding the transitions in perceptions of external students

Most student withdrawals from studying at a distance are for personal reasons. This paper is an attempt at clarifying and analysing the reasons from a more subjective perspective than the often‐used survey. The first step in this process is to identify the students’ perceptions of their situation, as they make the necessary transitions from non‐student to student.

The study endeavours to outline a conceptual framework for investigating these transitions, with its main emphasis being on the interpretation of the students’ perspective of the influences acting on them. The next step would be to use this information as a basis for more systematic (rather than intuitive) specialised counselling of distance education students.     

Learning consequences for university students using computerized mastery testing

Mastery learning, it is claimed, is among the most successful practices in higher education. Evidence supporting this claim has recently been criticized as empirically weak. This experiment employed a four-group, pre-post design to examine the learning consequences of a computer-administered mastery-testing approach in comparison with a seminar-discussion approach in a third-year university course. The mastery-testing approach generated significantly higher learning achievement than did the seminar-discussion approach. Replication and extension of this research approach are recommended to support generalizations across mastery-testing techniques, delivery systems, and disciplines.     

Entwicklungsförderung im außerschulischen Kinder- und Jugendsport

The concept “Psychosocial Resources in Sport” (Sygusch, Ein sportartenorientiertes Förderkonzept für Schule und Verein. Schorndorf: Hofmann, 2007) substantiates methodical measures to systematically promote resources such as self-concept, self-efficacy, group cohesion, and social competence. In the PRimus-study this concept was implemented in handball and apparatus gymnastics over 7 months in 29 training groups (age: 12–16 years). The aim, amongst others, was to evaluate whether the concept is effective in child and youth sport. For this purpose a mixed-method design was chosen. The development of resources were measured through qualitative trainer interviews (n?=?39) as well as quantitative surveys of athletes (IG: n?=?374; KG: n?=?270) over three measurement times. The trainer statements show that the intervention initiated resource strengthening processes which indicate a promotion of resources. The quantitative measurements, however, do not reveal substantial changes throughout the intervention period. The change in behavior of coaches and athletes – regardless of the intervention measures – influences the development of resources. Overall, it must be noted that broad-based intervention concepts, which are also feasible, had difficulty proving the effects and the effectiveness.     

Hybrid XML Retrieval: Combining Information Retrieval and a Native XML Database

This paper investigates the impact of three approaches to XML retrieval: using Zettair, a full-text information retrieval system; using eXist, a native XML database; and using a hybrid system that takes full article answers from Zettair and uses eXist to extract elements from those articles. For the content-only topics, we undertake a preliminary analysis of the INEX 2003 relevance assessments in order to identify the types of highly relevant document components. Further analysis identifies two complementary sub-cases of relevance assessments (General and Specific) and two categories of topics (Broad and Narrow). We develop a novel retrieval module that for a content-only topic utilises the information from the resulting answer list of a native XML database and dynamically determines the preferable units of retrieval, which we call Coherent Retrieval Elements. The results of our experiments show that—when each of the three systems is evaluated against different retrieval scenarios (such as different cases of relevance assessments, different topic categories and different choices of evaluation metrics)—the XML retrieval systems exhibit varying behaviour and the best performance can be reached for different values of the retrieval parameters. In the case of INEX 2003 relevance assessments for the content-only topics, our newly developed hybrid XML retrieval system is substantially more effective than either Zettair or eXist, and yields a robust and a very effective XML retrieval.     

Entity ranking in Wikipedia: utilising categories,links and topic difficulty prediction

Entity ranking has recently emerged as a research field that aims at retrieving entities as answers to a query. Unlike entity extraction where the goal is to tag names of entities in documents, entity ranking is primarily focused on returning a ranked list of relevant entity names for the query. Many approaches to entity ranking have been proposed, and most of them were evaluated on the INEX Wikipedia test collection. In this paper, we describe a system we developed for ranking Wikipedia entities in answer to a query. The entity ranking approach implemented in our system utilises the known categories, the link structure of Wikipedia, as well as the link co-occurrences with the entity examples (when provided) to retrieve relevant entities as answers to the query. We also extend our entity ranking approach by utilising the knowledge of predicted classes of topic difficulty. To predict the topic difficulty, we generate a classifier that uses features extracted from an INEX topic definition to classify the topic into an experimentally pre-determined class. This knowledge is then utilised to dynamically set the optimal values for the retrieval parameters of our entity ranking system. Our experiments demonstrate that the use of categories and the link structure of Wikipedia can significantly improve entity ranking effectiveness, and that topic difficulty prediction is a promising approach that could also be exploited to further improve the entity ranking performance.     

Is remote near-peer anatomy teaching an effective teaching strategy? Lessons learned from the transition to online learning during the Covid-19 pandemic

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, medical educators have transformed pre-clerkship anatomy curricula into online formats. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness and student perceptions of an online near-peer anatomy curriculum. The classes of 2022 and 2023 completed identical foundational anatomy curricula in-person, whereas the class of 2024 completed an adapted curriculum for remote online learning. Quantitative and qualitative responses were used to compare attitudes between instructional methods. Assessment scores and evaluation survey responses were collected from the classes of 2022 (n = 185), 2023 (n = 184), and 2024 (n = 183). Mean assessment scores (±SD) for the classes of 2022, 2023, and 2024 were 93.64% (±5.86), 93.75% (±4.09), and 92.04% (±4.83), respectively. Post hoc group comparisons showed the class of 2024 scored significantly lower than the two previous classes [2022: (H(1) = 18.58, P < 0.001), 2023: (H(1) = 18.65, P < 0.001)]. Mean survey results concerning curriculum quality were 4.06/5.00 for the class of 2023 and 3.57/5.0 for the class of 2024 (t(365) = 2.67, P = 0.008). Considering a small effect size (η² = 0.034), there was no meaningful difference in student assessment scores. A potential drawback of online near-peer anatomy teaching remains in student perceptions of course quality; qualitative feedback suggested technological limitations and perceptions of online course instructors were partly responsible for lower student satisfaction. Following the Covid-19 pandemic, medical educators should incorporate the lessons learned from this unique educational inflection point to improve curricula moving forward.