Judging where a ball will go: the case of curved free kicks in football

This study examined whether adding spin to a ball in the free kick situation in football affects a professional footballer's perception of the ball's future arrival position. Using a virtual reality set-up, participants observed the flight paths of aerodynamically realistic free kicks with (+/- 600 rpm) and without sidespin. With the viewpoint being fixed in the centre of the goal, participants had to judge whether the ball would have ended up in the goal or not. Results show that trajectories influenced by the Magnus force caused by sidespin gave rise to a significant shift in the percentage of goal responses. The resulting acceleration that causes the ball to continually change its heading direction as the trajectory unfolds does not seem to be taken into account by the participants when making goal judgments. We conclude that the visual system is not attuned to such accelerated motion, which may explain why goalkeepers appear to misjudge the future arrival point of such curved free kicks.

Where do parents go for feeding advice in the first year?

Health visiting services have been restructured from being universal for all children to targeting families in need. UK recommendations on infant feeding have also recently changed. With the many sources of information available on feeding babies, it is important to know where parents get feeding advice and which sources they find valuable. In this study, 215 mothers of one-year old infants were interviewed about where they had obtained feeding advice in the first year of their infant’s life and how useful they found this information. The health visitor was the most commonly cited source of information (70%) followed by grandparents (53%), while 10% of mothers relied solely on health visitor advice. This study highlights the importance placed by mothers on health visitors, which may have implications for the service in the midst of the reorganisation of the health visitor’s role.

Can they go it alone? Addressing criticisms of coteaching.

This paper responds to Wassell and LaVan’s paper on the transition from a preservice coteaching experience to independent teaching as a beginning inservice teacher. Wassell and LaVan describe coteaching as an alternative to traditional teaching. In our response, we argue that coteaching can also be applied alongside independent teaching in preservice courses, as opposed to an alternative to independent teaching, which has been shown to alleviate some of the transition issues described by Wassell and LaVan. We then present a critical discussion of different models and vocabularies of coteaching which apply in different sociocultural settings to expand the concept of coteaching. We attempt to extend Wassell and LaVan’s use of Guba and Lincoln’s (Fourth generation evaluation, 1989) authenticity criteria from the research methodology towards considering the criteria also as a framework for coteaching as practice for preservice and cooperating teachers. Finally, we reflect on the role of critical ethnography in Wassell and LaVan’s study in terms of the researchers’ intervention and whether improvements in the transition can be effectively introduced which do not require such intervention. We conclude our discussion with some suggestions to take forward this important work.