Relationships Among Values, Achievement Orientations, and Attitudes in Youth Sport

This research examines the value-expressive function of attitudes and achievement goal theory in predicting moral attitudes. In Study 1, the Youth Sport Values Questionnaire (YSVQ; Lee, Whitehead, & Balchin, 2000) was modified to measure moral,competence, and status values. In Study 2, structural equation modeling on data from 549 competitors (317 males, 232 females) aged 12–15 years showed that moral and competence values predicted prosocial attitudes, whereas moral (negatively) and status values (positively)predicted antisocial attitudes. Competence and status values predicted task and ego orientation, respectively, and task and ego orientation partially mediated the effect of competence values on prosocial attitudes and of status values on antisocial attitudes, respectively. The role of sport values is discussed, and new research directions are proposed

An Examination of Demographics, Personal Values, and Philosophical Orientations of College Students from Multiple University Campuses

The purpose of this study is to identify what current students value today and to determine whether there is a link between personal values and student demographics. A brief demographic survey of fourteen questions was developed and distributed, along with a twenty-question survey which is used determine participant’s values, or philosophical orientation (McKee, Boyatzis, & Johnston, 2008). There were two hundred and forty-two subjects who volunteered over a two-week time period for this research project. Analysis was completed comparing various demographics (such as age, gender, nationality, first generation students) to determine if certain demographics strongly correlated with a particular philosophical orientation, such as pragmatic, human or intellectual. This manuscript further describes some of the current research within the field, the method in which the data was collected and analyzed, as well as the results

Achievement goals and motivational responses in tennis: Does the context matter?

Objectives: This study examined: (a) whether athletes’ goal orientations differ across training and competition; (b) whether goal orientations predict effort, enjoyment, and psychological skill use differently in training and competition; and (c) whether goal orientations predict perceived improvement in training and perceived performance in competition. Method: Participants were 116 competitive tennis players (mean age = 19.99, SD = 5.82), who completed questionnaires measuring goal orientations, effort, enjoyment, and psychological skill use in training and competition, perceived improvement in training, and perceived performance in competition. Results: Dependent t-tests revealed that athletes reported higher task orientation in training than in competition and higher ego orientation in competition than in training, while Pearson product-moment correlations revealed a high cross-contextual consistency for both task and ego goal orientations between training and competition. Regression analyses indicated that task orientation predicted positively effort, enjoyment, self-talk, and goal setting in both contexts, perceived improvement in training, and perceived performance in competition. An interaction effect also emerged whereby ego orientation predicted positively effort in competition only when task orientation was low or average. Conclusions: The findings suggest that goal orientations may differ between training and competition; task orientation is the goal that should be promoted in both contexts; and the context may affect the relationship between goal orientations and effort, enjoyment, and goal setting

Multiple Retrieval Models and Regression Models for Prior Art Search

This paper presents the system called PATATRAS (PATent and Article Tracking, Retrieval and AnalysiS) realized for the IP track of CLEF 2009. Our approach presents three main characteristics: 1. The usage of multiple retrieval models (KL, Okapi) and term index definitions (lemma, phrase, concept) for the three languages considered in the present track (English, French, German) producing ten different sets of ranked results. 2. The merging of the different results based on multiple regression models using an additional validation set created from the patent collection. 3. The exploitation of patent metadata and of the citation structures for creating restricted initial working sets of patents and for producing a final re-ranking regression model. As we exploit specific metadata of the patent documents and the citation relations only at the creation of initial working sets and during the final post ranking step, our architecture remains generic and easy to extend