Process Evaluation of A Physical Activity Self-Management Program For Children: Spark

Abstract

SPARK is a controlled field study of a multi-component elementary school program to promote physical activity. One component is a weekly classroom-based self-management program, with the goal of increasing physical activity outside of school. The curriculum included goal setting, behavioral skills training, a reward system, and parent involvement. An evaluation of curriculum implementation and association between process and outcome was conducted using direct observation of lessons, subjective ratings by 24 teachers and 391 parents, and participation records of 549 students. Teachers viewed the self-management curriculum less positively than the physical education curriculum. Teachers were observed implementing an average of 65% of curriculum elements, which may have contributed to the limited effects of the self-management program. Student participation in the program, measured by points earned for doing out of school physical activity, was correlated significantly with changes in body mass index and multiple psychosocial variables among boys but not girls. Barriers to full program implementation were identified, and a remaining challenge is to improve self-management curriculum implementation by teachers.     

Gaze bias: Selective encoding and liking effects

People look longer at things that they choose than things they do not choose. How much of this tendency—the gaze bias effect—is due to a liking effect compared to the information encoding aspect of the decision-making process? Do these processes compete under certain conditions? We monitored eye movements during a visual decision-making task with four decision prompts: Like, dislike, older, and newer. The gaze bias effect was present during the first dwell in all conditions except the dislike condition, when the preference to look at the liked item and the goal to identify the disliked item compete. Colour content (whether a photograph was colour or black-and-white), not decision type, influenced the gaze bias effect in the older/newer decisions because colour is a relevant feature for such decisions. These interactions appear early in the eye movement record, indicating that gaze bias is influenced during information encoding.     

Context effects in recognition memory: the role of familiarity and recollection

A variant of the process dissociation procedure was coupled with a manipulation of response signal lag to assess whether manipulations of context affect one or both of the familiarity and search processes described by the dual process model of recognition. Participants studied a list of word pairs (context+target) followed by a recognition test with target words presented in the same or different context, and in the same or different form as study (singular/plural). Participants were asked to recognize any target word regardless of changes to form (inclusion), or to only recognise words that were presented in the same form (exclusion). The standard context reinstatement effect was evident even at the short response lags. Analyses of the estimates of the contributions of familiarity and search processes suggest that the context effect demonstrated here can be attributed in part to the influence of familiarity on recognition, whereas the effect on recollection was less clear.     

Separation/divorce sexual assault: The current state of social scientific knowledge

Many contend that the logical solution to woman abuse in marriage/cohabitation is for women to exit through legal separation, divorce, or other means. However, a growing body of empirical work shows that separation or divorce does not necessarily solve the problem of woman abuse. For example, in addition to experiencing lethal or nonlethal forms of physical violence and psychological abuse, many women who try to leave, or who have left their male partners, are sexually assaulted. The main objective of this paper is to critically review the extant empirical and theoretical work on separation/divorce sexual assault. Suggestions for future research and theorizing are also provided.     

Component analysis of ECG by computer

The present paper describes a set of interactive computer programs and methods (i.e., cardiac component analysis, CCA) that allow the collection, summation, and averaging of the time durations of the various ECG components. The programs are written in FORTRAN and run on a Texas Instruments minicomputer using an Intecolor 8001 terminal as the display device. The program’s features include analog-to-digital conversion, color display of individual heart-beats, operator interaction, and statistical summation with tabular output. Subroutines are well structured and easily transported to other machines. Although these programs may be used on-line, it has been more efficient to perform the analyses off-line, after a subject has completed the task. Various versions of the program have been used to analyze human, baboon, and dog ECGs in 2- to 30-sec epochs, at sample rates of 258 and 1,000 samples/sec. Preliminary results from an experiment of the effects of meditation and cognitive overload are discussed.