Search

Abstract Background Teachers are recognized as ‘key agents’ for the delivery of physical activity programs and policies in schools. The aim of our study was to develop and evaluate a tool to assess teachers’ capability, opportunity, and motivation to deliver school-based physical activity interventions. Methods The development and evaluation of the Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation to deliver Physical Activity in School Scale (COM-PASS) involved three phases. In Phase 1, we invited academic experts to participate in a Delphi study to rate, provide recommendations, and achieve consensus on questionnaire items that were based on the Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation Behavior (COM-B) model. Each item was ranked on the degree to which it matched the content of the COM-B model, using a 5-point scale ranging from ‘1 = Poor match’ to ‘5 = Excellent match’. In Phase 2, we interviewed primary and secondary school teachers using a ‘think-aloud’ approach to assess their understanding of the items. In Phase 3, teachers (n = 196) completed the COM-PASS to assess structural validity using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Results Thirty-eight academic experts from 14 countries completed three rounds of the Delphi study. In the first round, items had an average rating score of 4.04, in the second round 4.51, and in the third (final) round 4.78. The final tool included 14 items, which related to the six constructs of the COM-B model: physical capability, psychological capability, physical opportunity, social opportunity, reflective motivation, and automatic motivation. In Phase 2, ten teachers shared their interpretation of COM-PASS via a 20-min interview, which resulted in minor changes. In Phase 3, CFA of the 3-factor model (i.e., capability, opportunity, and motivation) revealed an adequate fit to the data (χ2 = 122.6, p

Nature play can significantly benefit children's development, health and well-being, however, limited literature on the considerations needed to deliver such programs for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities exists. Co-design methods in health promotion program design are gaining popularity, yet practical guidance is lacking. Using a synthesised operational co-design framework, engaging industry experts and CALD children's primary carers, a series of workshops were undertaken to develop a population-acceptable nature play program. The findings highlight the importance of providing culturally appropriate information and messaging, promoting social connectedness and cultural awareness, incorporating learning and education and addressing fears and judgments. This research contributes to varying bodies of literature and offers practical insights for programs aiming to improve the health and well-being of CALD communities through nature play, warranting further research to evaluate their impacts and long-term effects.

The Southern Ocean is a critical component of Earth's climate system, but its remoteness makes it challenging to develop a holistic understanding of its processes from the small scale to the large scale. As a result, our knowledge of this vast region remains largely incomplete. The Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition (ACE, austral summer 2016/2017) surveyed a large number of variables describing the state of the ocean and the atmosphere, the freshwater cycle, atmospheric chemistry, and ocean biogeochemistry and microbiology. This circumpolar cruise included visits to 12 remote islands, the marginal ice zone, and the Antarctic coast. Here, we use 111 of the observed variables to study the latitudinal gradients, seasonality, shorter-term variations, geographic setting of environmental processes, and interactions between them over the duration of 90 d. To reduce the dimensionality and complexity of the dataset and make the relations between variables interpretable we applied an unsupervised machine learning method, the sparse principal component analysis (sPCA), which describes environmental processes through 14 latent variables. To derive a robust statistical perspective on these processes and to estimate the uncertainty in the sPCA decomposition, we have developed a bootstrap approach. Our results provide a proof of concept that sPCA with uncertainty analysis is able to identify temporal patterns from diurnal to seasonal cycles, as well as geographical gradients and “hotspots” of interaction between environmental compartments. While confirming many well known processes, our analysis provides novel insights into the Southern Ocean water cycle (freshwater fluxes), trace gases (interplay between seasonality, sources, and sinks), and microbial communities (nutrient limitation and island mass effects at the largest scale ever reported). More specifically, we identify the important role of the oceanic circulations, frontal zones, and islands in shaping the nutrient availability that controls biological community composition and productivity; the fact that sea ice controls sea water salinity, dampens the wave field, and is associated with increased phytoplankton growth and net community productivity possibly due to iron fertilisation and reduced light limitation; and the clear regional patterns of aerosol characteristics that have emerged, stressing the role of the sea state, atmospheric chemical processing, and source processes near hotspots for the availability of cloud condensation nuclei and hence cloud formation. A set of key variables and their combinations, such as the difference between the air and sea surface temperature, atmospheric pressure, sea surface height, geostrophic currents, upper-ocean layer light intensity, surface wind speed and relative humidity played an important role in our analysis, highlighting the necessity for Earth system models to represent them adequately. In conclusion, our study highlights the use of sPCA to identify key ocean–atmosphere interactions across physical, chemical, and biological processes and their associated spatio-temporal scales. It thereby fills an important gap between simple correlation analyses and complex Earth system models. The sPCA processing code is available as open-access from the following link: https://renkulab.io/gitlab/ACE-ASAID/spca-decomposition (last access: 29 March 2021). As we show here, it can be used for an exploration of environmental data that is less prone to cognitive biases (and confirmation biases in particular) compared to traditional regression analysis that might be affected by the underlying research question.

We study the effects of the COVID pandemic on educational attainment. By 2022, entry into two-year colleges was 21 percent lower than before the pandemic, with larger declines in Black- and Hispanic-majority colleges. Four-year college entry declined by only 6 percent and then rebounded 4 percent. High school graduation reached an all-time high in 2022. To explain these patterns, we undertook an interrupted time series design. Lower numbers of COVID cases and higher levels of in-person instruction led to increased college entry and possibly increased graduation. Relaxation of graduation standards explain between-state variation in high school graduation and helps explain the continued high graduation rates. Changing labor-market opportunities do not explain cross-state variation in attainment. We suggest additional explanations for these trends. Barring other substantial changes, we predict that future college attainment will be lower for cohorts of school or college age during the pandemic, especially for some marginalized groups.

Purpose: Although California school discipline policy changes over the past decade have resulted in significant drops in suspension rates, scholars have found that racial disproportionality in punitive discipline persists for Black, Indigenous, and at times Latinx students. This study utilizes racial capitalism as an analytical framework to examine the mechanisms and justifications for racially disproportionate discipline across three distinct California political economies. Research Methods/Approach: Drawing on a subset of qualitative comparative case study data of five schools taken from a larger 5-year study of 31 schools in 17 California districts with distinct racial and economic composition, we investigate the phenomena of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx student disposability--those who continue to experience exclusion in a time of progressive school discipline reform. Findings: We find that (1) student disposability through discipline was not only intertwined with dominant local narratives about racial groups but also tied to a larger system of racial capitalism reliant on the racialized differentiation of students within every geographical location, and (2) when progressive alternative approaches to discipline fail, these reforms uncover rooted antiblackness, anti-indigeneity, and a gang imaginary such that students who fail or refuse to assimilate to the underlying labor-sorting function of US schools are considered disposable. Implications: Our findings highlight the need to center and elevate disposable youth brilliance in decision making, the importance of building collective movements against racial capitalism's grip on schools, and the obligation to build education beyond racial capitalism.

Globally, the waste sector contributes to nearly a fifth of anthropogenic methane emitted to the atmosphere and is the second largest source of methane in the UK. In recent years great improvements to reduce those emissions have been achieved by the installation of methane recovery systems at landfill sites, and subsequently methane emissions reported in national emission inventories have been reduced. Nevertheless, methane emissions of landfills remain uncertain and quantification of emission fluxes is essential to verify reported emission inventories and to monitor changes in emissions. Here we present a new approach for methane emission quantification from a complex source such as a landfill site by applying a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model to calibrated in situ measurements of methane as part of a field campaign at a landfill site near Ipswich, UK, in August 2014. The methane distribution for different meteorological scenarios is calculated with the CFD model and compared to methane mole fractions measured by an in situ Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer downwind of the prevailing wind direction. Assuming emissions only from the active site, a mean daytime flux of 0.83 mg m−2 s−1, corresponding to a spatially integrated emission of 53.3 kg h−1, was estimated. The addition of a secondary source area adjacent to the active site, where some methane hotspots were observed, improved the agreement between the simulated and measured methane distribution. As a result, the flux from the active site was reduced slightly to 0.71 mg m−2 s−1 (45.6 kg h−1), and at the same time an additional flux of 0.32 mg m−2 s−1 (30.4 kg h−1) was found from the secondary source area. This highlights the capability of our method to distinguish between different emission areas of the landfill site, which can provide more detailed information about emission source apportionment compared to other methods deriving bulk emissions.

Ozone profile trends over the period 2000 to 2016 from several merged satellite ozone data sets and from ground-based data measured by four techniques at stations of the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change indicate significant ozone increases in the upper stratosphere, between 35 and 48 km altitude (5 and 1 hPa). Near 2 hPa (42 km), ozone has been increasing by about 1.5 % per decade in the tropics (20° S to 20° N), and by 2 to 2.5 % per decade in the 35 to 60° latitude bands of both hemispheres. At levels below 35 km (5 hPa), 2000 to 2016 ozone trends are smaller and not statistically significant. The observed trend profiles are consistent with expectations from chemistry climate model simulations. This study confirms positive trends of upper stratospheric ozone already reported, e.g., in the WMO/UNEP Ozone Assessment 2014 or by Harris et al. (2015). Compared to those studies, three to four additional years of observations, updated and improved data sets with reduced drift, and the fact that nearly all individual data sets indicate ozone increase in the upper stratosphere, all give enhanced confidence. Uncertainties have been reduced, for example for the trend near 2 hPa in the 35 to 60° latitude bands from about ±5 % (2σ) in Harris et al. (2015) to less than ±2 % (2σ). Nevertheless, a thorough analysis of possible drifts and differences between various data sources is still required, as is a detailed attribution of the observed increases to declining ozone-depleting substances and to stratospheric cooling. Ongoing quality observations from multiple independent platforms are key for verifying that recovery of the ozone layer continues as expected.

In this article, the authors study family preferences in one of the most competitive school markets ever developed in the United States: New Orleans, where virtually all district students attend a charter school. The vast majority provide transportation from anywhere in the city, and none can charge tuition. Admission is based on parental preferences expressed through a common application system. For many years, an advocacy group also published detailed school guides to inform families' choices. Not only do parents have more freedom to choose, but they have a ready source of information and a wide variety of options to choose from. What are the school characteristics that drive family choices, and how do family resources influence these decisions? The authors begin by reporting average preferences across all families choosing among elementary schools and among high schools, and then look for any differences in preferences based on family income. To quantify the findings, the authors take advantage of a consistent finding in research on school choice in New Orleans and elsewhere: all else being equal, families strongly prefer a school that is close to their home. They first measure the extent to which proximity to school influences the choices of families in the sample, then express findings for other school characteristics in terms of relative distance from home to school.

We describe the levels, trends, and patterns of school closure and restructuring in the United States from 1991 to 2019 across all sectors using a near census of K-12 schools. Focusing on the years with the best available data, 2014-18, we find that the annual closure rate of charter, private, and traditional public schools (TPSs) were 5.1, 2.9, and 0.9 percent, respectively. The annual restructuring rates are 2.0 percent for charter schools and 0.6 percent for TPSs. Regression analysis shows that these differences in closure and restructuring rates by sector drop slightly after controlling for student and school characteristics. The strongest predictor of increased closures is low student enrollment, especially in private schools. In charter and traditional public schools, achievement measures predict closure and restructuring nearly as strongly as enrollment. While racial and income composition are weaker predictors of closure/restructuring, that they predict at all, after controlling for many other factors, raises some equity concerns. We also discuss ways in which the forces behind closure/restructuring may be difficult to uncover with this type of quantitative analysis.

Market-based policies, especially school vouchers, are expanding rapidly and shifting students out of traditional public schools. This article broadens, deepens, and updates prior critiques of the free market logic in five ways. First, although prior articles have pointed to some of the conditions necessary for efficient market functioning, I provide a more comprehensive list. Second, with an up-to-date literature review, I show that all of these conditions fail to hold to an unusual extent in schooling relative to other markets. Third, because of these failures, I argue that the most potent critique of the free market approach to schooling comes from the intellectual home of markets-economics. Fourth, I show that the issues leading to inefficiency are the same ones leading to inequity. Fifth, I argue that the analysis points to specific roles for government that go well beyond those included in new universal school voucher policies but are also narrower than the roles of government encompassed in traditional public education. For these reasons, the current policy direction is off track and apparently inconsistent with the main criteria on which we evaluate education policy and even with the values that voucher advocates profess.

Research on charter schools tends to focus on direct and immediate effects on student outcomes. However, there may be unintended indirect effects on, for example, the teacher labor market. Charter schools tend to hire teachers with fewer traditional teaching credentials, which may reduce the equilibrium quantity of teachers who have traditional credentials and seek to make teaching a career. We test whether charter entry reduces the supply of university teacher education degrees, exploiting within- and between-district variation in the timing of charter school entry in districts containing college teacher preparation programs. Applying a generalized difference-in-difference model, we find that a 10 percent increase in charter market share decreases the supply of traditionally prepared teachers by one percent per year on average. This effect is concentrated in elementary education and special education degrees, which, anecdotally, are less valued in charter schools.

We study the total, market-level effects of charter schools, and their mechanisms, on a national level and across multiple outcomes. Using a generalized difference-in-differences method, we find that increasing the charter market share by 10 percentage points increases math and ELA elementary/middle test scores of the entire geographic district in which they locate by 0.01 standard deviations and increases the high school graduation rate by 1-2 percentage points. The effects are concentrated in larger, urban districts. The main mechanism appears to be the participant effect, though competitive effects are increasing in the participant effect and driven partly by the closure of low-performing traditional public schools. Causal interpretation of these findings is reinforced by analysis of potential endogeneity of charter school location and timing using placebo analysis and other methods. This study improves understanding of the array of charter mechanisms and their effects on multiple outcomes, on a national basis.