A Pilot Study of the Relationship of Calcium Intake and Frequency of Injuries In High School Athletes

Little information is available related to adolescent calcium intake and relationships with injuries they might suffer from sport participation. To determine calcium intake of high school athletes, to assess their self reported injury rates, and to examine the relationship between the two over a 12 month period of time. Participants received a questionnaire at their school and completed it anywhere they found convenient. Adolescent athletes in the Lincoln Public School system (n=43) that participated in at least one sport in the past year. Four age groups participated in the study with sixteen year olds having a significantly higher calcium intake at 1297 mg that of fourteen year olds. A variety of sports were represented with largest number of respondents participating in baseball/or softball at (55%). The next most played sport was basketball at (18%). Median total diet calcium was 1144.5 mg with a mean of 1182 mg + 567 mg. For the frequency of injuries that caused a missed practice or game in the past year, ankle injuries were the most common (25%). Knee injuries were the second most common (17%), followed closely by hand injuries (8%). Mean total diet calcium of athletes with five or more injuries that caused a missed practice or game was significantly higher at 1966 mg (P<.05) than athletes mean diet calcium with zero, one, two, and three injuries. Total milk calcium of those who reported three injuries that resulted in broken or fractured bones or dislocated joints was significantly higher (P<.05) at 1286 mg of total milk calcium than those who reported having zero, one, or two breaks or fractures. Athletes with higher calcium intakes have a higher number of reported injuries. This may be the result of increased vigorous activity which leads to increased calorie and calcium consumption. More importantly, this increased activity leads to an increased chance of injury. The greater calcium intake correlated with greater number of injuries may also be because of third parties advising the athletes who get injured to drink more milk and get more calcium in their diets because they have been injuries already.

Alternative Tasks for the Teaching and the Learning of functions: analysis of an intervention in the High School

In this paper we focus on the application of two mathematical alternative tasks to the teaching and learning of functions with high school students. The tasks were elaborated according to the following methodological approach: (i) Problem Solving and/or mathematics investigation and (ii) a pedagogical proposal, which defends that mathematical knowledge is developed by means of a balance between logic and intuition. We employed a qualitative research approach (characterized as a case study) aimed at analyzing the didactic pedagogical potential of this type of methodology in high school. We found that tasks such as those presented and discussed in this paper provide a more significant learning for the students, allowing a better conceptual understanding, becoming still more powerful when one considers the social-cultural context of the students.

Midwifery Training in Brazil: Context, Challenges and Perspectives

This article describes the creation process of the first direct-entry Midwifery Course in Brazil, at the School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities of the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. It presents the course's political-educational project and the theoretical references that support it; the movements or resistances that are opposed to the training and registration of midwives; the challenges that need to be overcome. Finally, the paper presents the foreseen perspectives of contribution of these professionals towards the improvement of healthcare quality, the decrease in maternal and perinatal morbidity and mortality rates, as well as of unnecessary cesarean sections in the country.

Brazilian research on extremophiles in the context of astrobiology

Extremophiles are organisms adapted to grow at extreme ranges of environmental variables, such as high or low temperatures, acid or alkaline medium, high salt concentration, high pressures and so forth. Most extremophiles are micro-organisms that belong to the Archaea and Bacteria domains, and are widely spread across the world, which include the polar regions, volcanoes, deserts, deep oceanic sediments, hydrothermal vents, hypersaline lakes, acid and alkaline water bodies, and other extreme environments considered hostile to human life. Despite the tropical climate, Brazil has a wide range of ecosystems which include some permanent or seasonally extreme environments. For example, the Cerrado is a biome with very low soil pH with high Al+3 concentration, the mangroves in the Brazilian coast are anaerobic and saline, Pantanal has thousands of alkaline-saline lakes, the Caatinga arid and hot soils and the deep sea sediments in the Brazilian ocean shelf. These environments harbour extremophilic organisms that, coupled with the high natural biodiversity in Brazil, could be explored for different purposes. However, only a few projects in Brazil intended to study the extremophiles. In the frame of astrobiology, for example, these organisms could provide important models for defining the limits of life and hypothesize about life outside Earth. Brazilian microbiologists have, however, studied the extremophilic micro-organisms inhabiting non-Brazilian environments, such as the Antarctic continent. The experience and previous results obtained from the Brazilian Antarctic Program (PROANTAR) provide important results that are directly related to astrobiology. This article is a brief synopsis of the Brazilian experience in researching extremophiles, indicating the most important results related to astrobiology and some future perspectives in this area. Received 29 February 2012, accepted 25 May 2012, first published online 11 July 2012

Teacher resistance to school-based consultation with the school psychologist: An analysis according to school level and model of identification for special education services

Consultation is promoted throughout school psychology literature as a best practice in service delivery. This method has numerous benefits including being able to work with more students at one time, providing practitioners with preventative rather than strictly reactive strategies, and helping school professionals meet state and federal education mandates and initiatives. Despite the benefits of consultation, teachers are sometimes resistant to this process.This research studies variables hypothesized to lead to resistance (Gonzalez, Nelson, Gutkin, & Shwery, 2004) and attempts to distinguish differences between school level (elementary, middle and high school) with respect to the role played by these variables and to determine if the model used to identify students for special education services has an influence on resistance factors. Twenty-sixteachers in elementary and middle schools responded to a demographicquestionnaire and a survey developed by Gonzalez, et al. (2004). This survey measures eight variables related to resistance to consultation. No high school teachers responded to the request to participate. Results of analysis of variance indicated a significant difference in the teaching efficacy subscale with elementary teachers reporting more efficacy in teaching than middle school teachers. Results also indicate a significant difference in classroom managementefficacy with teachers who work in schools that identify students according to a Response to Intervention model reporting higher classroom management efficacy than teachers who work in schools that identify students according to a combined method of refer-test-place/RtI combination model. Implications, limitations and directions for future research are discussed.

A Comparative Study of English Word Order Acquisition by Elementary and Secondary School Pupils - Native Speakers of Serbian and Hungarian

Kitic investigated the phenomenon of English word order acquisition by Serbian and Hungarian speakers, examining both the theoretical and empirical aspects of this phenomenon. She began by looking at language learning and language acquisition, viewing word order acquisition in the context of relevant linguistic and psycholinguistic knowledge. The main hypothesis of her empirical investigation was that the majority of word order mistakes in the language production of Serbian and Hungarian speakers of English is due to mother tongue interference. Three supporting hypotheses were introduced to specify the phenomenon of interference in its correlation to (1) language proficiency, (2) sentence patterns, and (3) optional adverbials. The conclusions were based on error analysis of 9280 sentences of 464 elementary and high school learners. The results showed that a learner's level of proficiency seems to be a relevant factor in mother tongue interference as this decreases with increased proficiency. Word order errors are however fossilised at the highest levels. The causes of interference errors, which increase with the number of sentence elements, are either absent sentence patterns or similar ones. In the case of adverbials, word order errors have two forms: interrelation (with canonical elements) and mixed adverbials.

Academic Intelligence is not Enough! WICS: An Expanded Model for Effective Practice in School and in Later Life

Is there a psychological basis for teaching and learning in the context of a liberal education, and if so, what might such a psychological basis look like? Traditional teaching and assessment often emphasize remembering facts and, to some extent, analyzing ideas. Such skills are important, but they leave out of the aspects of thinking that are most important not only in liberal education, but in life, in general. In this article, I propose a theory called WICS, which is an acronym for wisdom, intelligence, and creativity, synthesized. The basic idea underlying this theory is that, through liberal education, students need to acquire creative skills and attitudes to generate new ideas about how to adapt flexibly to a rapidly changing world, analytical skills and attitudes to ascertain whether these new ideas are good ones, practical skills and attitudes to implement the new ideas and convince others of their value, and wisdom-based skills and attitudes in order to ensure that the new ideas help to achieve a common good through the infusion of positive ethical values.