Research has shown that athletes who sustain injury often experience negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, and depressed mood, and that a negative psychological state can have a detrimental effect on injury rehabilitation and return to sport. For the most part, researchers have focused on athletes who have experienced short to moderate term injuries. Few have addressed long-term injury rehabilitation (LTIR). This thesis focuses on athletes who had experienced season ending injuries. Each athlete (3) was interviewed (four times) and invited to participate in psychological interventions (e.g., psycho-educational and cognitive behavioural) throughout LTIR lasting at least nine months. Athletes’ experiences are reported as long, narrative case studies. While the case studies explore four broad themes (affect, coping, social support, and psychological interventions) the overall narratives articulate the coherence and discord among athletes’ LTIR experiences (e.g., the positive and negative consequences of social support, life stress, pain, affect; the value of psychological interventions; the therapeutic aspect of ‘just’ talking to someone; etc.). The intimate issues identified and lived by each participant are examined and discussed in relation to the pre-existing athletic injury literature. Complex and dynamic relationships among the variables (e.g., emotional and behavioural responses, social factors, and physiological aspects) proposed in integrated models of injury rehabilitation (e.g., biopsychosocial) emerged in these narratives. These integrated models outline the dynamic and interrelated responses athletes have in response to injury and are the maps that practitioners treating these athletes may use. The athletes’ stories presented here, therefore, express some of the common ground injured athletes travel and are also rich and full of unique personal experiences. In both senses, though, they depict the actual, dynamic, rough, and often lonely process of LTIR—they are the real-life territory that those maps only partially describe.

The frequency of all residential fires that are attended by the Melbourne Metropolitan Fire Brigade is routinely recorded and hence well known. However, the frequency of residential fires which are not attended, including instances where the occupant of a dwelling has extinguished the fire or the fire has self-extinguished, has not previously been investigated in an Australian sample. This project includes two studies: in the first study the aim was to develop the Fire Safety Awareness and Experience Interview Schedule and to determine whether the risk factors for attended fires (in which there are fatalities or injuries) are different to the risk factors of residential fires not attended to by the fire brigade. Additionally, the first study aimed to determine the incidence of unattended residential fires by retrospective report from adults since the age of 18. The second study aim was to determine whether correct and regular maintenance behaviours were being carried out by occupants who own a smoke alarm. Five hundred participants, recruited from four shopping centers located in Melbourne, Victoria, completed the Fire Safety Awareness and Experience Interview Schedule. The questionnaire collected information on all residential fire experiences, including attended and unattended fires, since the age 18. Results showed that participants had approximately a 50% chance of experiencing either an attended or unattended residential fire within their adult lifetime; and the mean annual probability of having an unattended fire experience (0.8 fires per 100 adult years) was higher than the probability of having an attended fire experience (0.37 fires per 100 adult years). In addition, of all residential fires in which fire service attendance status was known, the vast majority of fires (78%) were unattended. Results also revealed the vast majority of unattended fires were caused when cooking was left unsupervised by the cook; and oil or food was usually the first material ignited. Of concern is the number of instances in which the unattended fire was extinguished via dangerous actions (i.e. moving the burning object the sink or floor of the home). It is therefore important to educate people on how to safely fight a cooking fire should one occur and occupants should be encouraged to have a fire blanket in an accessible location in their kitchens. Findings from Study Two revealed that the vast majority of the sample (96%) reported owning a smoke alarm. However, over one third of owners are not testing their alarms and 17% are not carrying out battery changes. Overall, the results from this project can be used to help prevent cooking fires in Australia and the developed interview schedule can be used to collect comparison data from other States and Territories. Furthermore, the development instrument can be used to collect unattended home fire data internationally.

Moving away from home to embark on a career at an elite level involves the individual within a broader social ecology where a range of factors influence the dynamic transition. In 2000, Indigenous and non-Indigenous past and present AFL footballers and AFL administrative staff suggested that relocation was one of the issues faced by Indigenous AFL footballers. The focus of the current study was to learn about relocation and settlement experiences from the perspectives of 10 Indigenous Australian AFL footballers, examining the social, cultural, organisational, and psychological challenges. Five participants were drafted to the AFL within 12 months, and five participants were drafted to the AFL prior to 2002. Participants were listed players from seven Victorian AFL clubs. Interviews were also conducted with eight representatives (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) from organisations associated with the AFL. Players were asked questions about their own relocation and settlement experiences. Secondary informants were asked questions about their involvement with Indigenous players relocating and their perception of the relocation process for Indigenous players in the AFL. Interviews were semi-structured and conversational in style and analysed for unique and recurring themes using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Each of the stories reflected subtle differences experienced during relocation, highlighting the importance and value of using a phenomenological and qualitative framework to understand each player’s perspective and experiences of relocation. The findings demonstrated both facilitative and barrier factors influencing the relocation, settlement, and adaptation experiences. These included opportunity and social mobility, social support and kindredness, culture shock, and racism and homogeneity. Each player’s story about relocation and subsequent settlement and adaptation, highlighted the importance of family, connection, and kindredness as an overarching theme. The findings emphasise the need for receiving environments, in this case the AFL, to treat every player on an individual basis rather than grouping them into a collective. It is essential that a player is understood in relation to his socio-cultural context. The AFL has implemented significant changes to welcome cultural diversity, but as a mainstream organisation, it has been developed within mainstream values. Just as society in general needs to acknowledge Australian history and the overall discrepancies between Indigenous and non-Indigenous opportunities and living standards, the AFL has to continue to de-institutionalise stereotypes and increase the cultural awareness of all groups to continue being a forerunner of progressive race relations. The current study represents an important initial step in the identification and description of the relocation processes from the vantage point of Indigenous footballers.

Humans are capable of selecting information that is goal-relevant. Irrelevant (distractor) information, however, typically is not filtered completely and impacts on responses to the goal. Recent theories of selective attention indicate that distractor interference is determined by the perceptual load of a visual display and the availability of cognitive control mechanisms (working memory load). It is unclear however, which mechanisms assist efficient selective attention and how irrelevant distracting information is rejected. Using a go/no-go visual attention task (Experiment 1) and a visual search task (Experiment 2), this series of experiments examined distractor processing in visual selective attention.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1965. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Bibliography: l. [42]-44.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz. / Photocopy of typescript. Bibliography: leaves 185-194.

No description available.

Children's interaction with peers supports cognitive development in numerous ways. The claim investigated in the present study is that these benefits include support at a metacognitive level that children provide one another, specifically in the form of meta-level speech aimed at regulating the other's behavior. This proposition originates in Vygotsky's views of a bi-directional zone of proximal development between peers with resulting transfer from inter-mental to intra-mental planes. Sixty-four 7th graders participated in the study. Students who shared a position on a social issue engaged in electronic dialogs with a succession of pairs who held an opposing position. In one condition (Stay), students worked with the identical same-side partner over six twice-weekly dialog sessions. In the other condition (Switch), students worked with a new same-side partner at each session. Students experienced both conditions, half of them first the Stay condition and then, discussing a new topic, the Switch condition. Condition order was reversed for the other half of participants. Students engaged in more frequent meta-talk in the Stay than the Switch condition; Stay conversations contained more frequent regulatory utterances than Switch conversations and a greater proportion of planning statements. Electronic dialogs produced in the Stay condition contained a higher proportion of meta-talk than those produced in the Switch condition; however, differences favoring the Stay condition in direct counterargument use were found at only one of two data collection points. On the whole, differences suggest that collaborators scaffolded one another’s meta-level development through regulatory conversation that evolved over time as collaborators developed their relationships, and that, for Stay pairs, this evolving shared regulatory talk extended to the electronic discourse. There was no consistent evidence, however, that this success extended to argument strategies on the discourse task.

This dissertation research focuses on assessing student behavior, academic emotions, and knowledge within a middle school online learning environment, and analyzing potential effects on students’ interests and choices related to decisions about going to college. Using students’ longitudinal data ranging from their middle school, to high school, to postsecondary years, this dissertation uses quantitative methodologies to investigate antecedents to college attendance that occur as early as middle school. The dissertation asks whether student behavior, academic emotions, and learning as early as middle school can be predictive of college attendance years later. This is investigated by developing predictive and structural models of said outcomes, using assessments of learning, emotions and engagement from student interaction data from an online learning environment they used in their middle school curriculum. The same middle school factors are also assessed with self-report measures of course choices, interests in college majors and careers formed when they were in high school. The dissertation then evaluates how student choices and interests in high school can mediate between the educational experiences students have during middle school and their eventual college attendance, to give a fuller illustration of the cognitive and non-cognitive mechanisms that students may experience throughout varied periods in school. Such understanding may provide educators with actionable information about a students’ in-depth experiences and trajectories within the college pipeline.

This study explored the relationship between specific instructional leadership behaviors of elementary principals and student achievement as measured by the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS). One hundred twenty-five principals were systematically and proportionally selected from Arizona, lowa, and Virginia. Seventy-two percent of the principals met all criteria and agreed to participate. The Measure of Elementary Principal Instructional Leadership Behavior, MEPILB, was developed for eight teachers at each school (total of 576) to indicate those instructional leadership behaviors demonstrated by their principals. Other data collected and analyzed were fourth grade ITBS mean normal curve equivalent, NCE, scores for two years, 1987-88 and 1989-90; percentage of students on free- and reduced-price meals as a proxy measure of socioeconomic status (SES); percentage of Parent-Teacher Association or organization membership as measure of parental involvement; district per pupil expenditures; and several school and principal demographic information. A principal components analysis with varimax rotation was performed on the MEPILB results to determine underlying instructional leadership dimensions. Four factors were revealed with two of those significantly associated with student achievement: monitoring instruction and testing (p < .05), and providing instructional feedback (p < .10). When these variables were added in the full regression model with SES, no significance was found between the two instructional leadership factors and student achievement. SES contributed the largest amount of explained variance to student achievement. The results of this study identified specific instructional leadership behaviors of elementary principals, but these behaviors were not found to significantly contribute to the variance in student achievement. / Ed. D.