Peer-Led Team Learning as an Instructional Strategy for Secondary School Science

This study investigated the impact of an instructional learning strategy, peer-led team learning (PLTL), on secondary school students' conceptual understanding of biology concepts related to the topic of evolution. Using a mixed methods approach, data were gathered quantitatively through pre/posttesting using a repeated measures design and qualitatively through observations, questionnaires, and interviews. A repeated measures design was implemented to explore the impact of PLTL on students' understanding of concepts related to evolution and students' attitudes towards PLTL implementation. Results from quantitative data comparing pre/posttesting were not able to be compared through inferential statistics as a result of inconsistencies in the data due to a small sample size and design limitations; however, qualitative data identified positive attitudes towards the implementation of PLTL, with students reporting gains in conceptual understanding, academic achievement, and interdependent work ethic. Implications of these findings for learning, teaching, and the educational literature include understanding of student attitudes towards PLTL and insight into the role PLTL plays in improving conceptual understanding of biology concepts. Strategies are suggested to continue further research in the area of PLTL.

Peer Motivational Climate and its Relationship with Positive and Negative Affect in Intramural Sports

The study of peers as an influence on sport participation has received minimal exploration. The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to determine how peer created motivational climates (task-involved and ego-involved) impact positive and negative affective states of intramural sport participants post-participation. Three hundred and fifteen intramural sport participants (N=315) at a Canadian university completed a questionnaire after participating in their intramural sport. Hierarchical regression analyses and MANCOVAs were used to examine the effects of peer motivational climates on positive and negative affect. Results revealed that task-involved peer climates are more conducive of positive affective states post-participation whereas ego-involved climates result in lesser positive affective states and more negative affective states. Teams that promote improvement and effort instead of intra-team competition and conflict will have more positive recreational sport experiences. Future research should explore other psychological outcomes that can result from peer created motivational climates in recreational sport team settings.

Becoming Peer Health Leaders: A Mixed-Methods Evaluation of a Youth Leadership Camp Preparing Peer Leaders for Participation in a Health Promotion Initiative.

Youth are critical partners in health promotion, but the process of training young people to become meaningfully involved is challenging. This mixed-methods evaluation considered the impact of a leadership camp in preparing 42 grade seven students to become peer health leaders in a ‘heart health’ initiative. The experiences of participants and their sense of agency were explored. Data were collected from pre and post camp surveys, focus groups, student journals and researcher observations. Findings indicate that relationships with peers and adults were key to agency development, and participants appeared to broaden their perspectives on the meanings of ‘health’ and ‘leadership.’ Significant changes on two sub-scales of the Harter Perceived Competence Scale for Children were also found. Suggestions for practice and further research are provided.

Peer Victimization and the Need to Belong within the Context of Recess

Within the school setting, recess is often reported as a frequent context for bullying (Vaillancourt et al. 2010), but is currently understudied. The present study utilized a mixed-methods approach in order to examine the frequency of peer victimization at recess and explore how the current context of recess relates to children’s sense of belonging. Participants included 464 students between grades 4 to 8 from nine Southern Ontario elementary schools. Self-report measures on peer victimization and belongingness were completed, along with open-ended questions regarding the recess context. Results demonstrated the frequencies of peer victimization at recess, the relationship between victimization and belonging, contextual factors that promote and impede belongingness at recess, and solutions to support children who feel left out.These findings provide further insight for educators and administrators in order to better support children who experience victimization within the recess context.

Examining peer-controlled KR schedules during the learning of a movement-timing task as a function of task experience.

Learners can be provided with feedback in the form of knowledge of results (KR), under self-controlled and peer-controlled schedules. Recently, McRae, Hansen, and Patterson (2015), identified that inexperienced peers can provide KR that can facilitate motor skill acquisition. However, it is currently unknown whether previous task experience differentially impacts how peers present learners with KR and whether this KR impacts motor skill acquisition. In the present study, participants were randomly assigned to become inexperienced peer facilitators, learners with an inexperienced peer, learners with self-control who later became experienced peers, learners with an experienced peer, or learners in a control group. During acquisition learners completed a serial-timing task with a goal of 2500ms and returned approximately twenty four hours later for a delayed retention, time transfer, and pattern transfer test. We predicted that during the delayed tests, learners with self-control would outperform all other groups. Furthermore, we predicted that learners who received KR from experienced peers would outperform learners who received KR from inexperienced peers. However, our results indicated that participants who received peer-controlled and self-controlled KR schedules learned the task in an equivalent manner. Thus, our results are novel as they identify that inexperienced peers can provide KR that is as effective as KR provided by experienced peers and KR requested under self-controlled conditions.

In Search of Advice for Physicians in Entry-Level Medical Markets

We consider entry-level medical markets for physicians in the United Kingdom. These markets experienced failures which led to the adoption of centralized market mechanisms in the 1960's. However, different regions introduced different centralized mechanisms. We advise physicians who do not have detailed information about the rank-order lists submitted by the other participants. We demonstrate that in each of these markets in a low information environment it is not beneficial to reverse the true ranking of any two acceptable hospital positions. We further show that (i) in the Edinburgh 1967 market, ranking unacceptable matches as acceptable is not profitable for any participant and (ii) in any other British entry-level medical market, it is possible that only strategies which rank unacceptable positions as acceptable are optimal for a physician.

Links between developmental changes in kindergarten behaviors and later peer associations

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

BioéthiqueOnline: Moving to Peer-Review / BioéthiqueOnline : Passage à l’évaluation par les pairs

Éditoral / Editorial

PEER TO PEER CACHE RESOLUTION MECHANISM FOR MOBILE AD HOC NETWORKS

In this paper we investigate the problem of cache resolution in a mobile peer to peer ad hoc network. In our vision cache resolution should satisfy the following requirements: (i) it should result in low message overhead and (ii) the information should be retrieved with minimum delay. In this paper, we show that these goals can be achieved by splitting the one hop neighbours in to two sets based on the transmission range. The proposed approach reduces the number of messages flooded in to the network to find the requested data. This scheme is fully distributed and comes at very low cost in terms of cache overhead. The experimental results gives a promising result based on the metrics of studies.

Mobile P2Ping: A Super-Peer based Structured P2P System Using a Fleet of City Buses

Recently, researchers have introduced the notion of super-peers to improve signaling efficiency as well as lookup performance of peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. In a separate development, recent works on applications of mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) have seen several proposals on utilizing mobile fleets such as city buses to deploy a mobile backbone infrastructure for communication and Internet access in a metropolitan environment. This paper further explores the possibility of deploying P2P applications such as content sharing and distributed computing, over this mobile backbone infrastructure. Specifically, we study how city buses may be deployed as a mobile system of super-peers. We discuss the main motivations behind our proposal, and outline in detail the design of a super-peer based structured P2P system using a fleet of city buses.

Cognitive appraisals, emotional reactions, and their associations with three forms of peer-victimization

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