The impact of parent-created motivational climate on adolescent athletes' perceptions of physical self-concept

This is a preliminary version of this article. The official published version can be obtained from the link below.Grounded in expectancy-value model (Eccles, 1993) and achievement goal theory (Nicholls, 1989), this study examined the perceived parental climate and its impact on athletes' perceptions of competence and ability. Hierarchical regression analyses with a sample of 237 British adolescent athletes revealed that mothers and fathers' task- and ego-involving climate predicted their son's physical self-concept; the father in particular is the strongest influence in shaping a son's physical self-concept positively and negatively. It was also found that the self-concept of the young adolescent athlete is more strongly affected by the perceived parental-created motivational climate (both task and ego) than the older adolescent athlete's self-concept. These findings support the expectancy-value model assumptions related to the role of parents as important socializing agents, the existence of gender-stereotyping, and the heavy reliance younger children place on parents' feedback

Examining the validity of the Athlete Engagement Questionnaire (AEQ) within a Portuguese sport setting

Sport psychology literature suggests that understanding engagement levels is pivotal to promote positive sporting experiences among athletes. The purpose of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Athlete Engagement Questionnaire among Portuguese sport athletes. Two distinct samples of Portuguese athletes from different competitive levels were collected, and the results of a confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated a good fit of the model to the data. A review of the psychometric properties indicated that all factors showed good composite reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. In addition, a multi-groups analysis showed the invariance of the model in two independent samples providing evidence of cross validity. Implications of these results for scholars and coaches are discussed and guidelines for future studies are suggested

Serious Gaming in Manufacturing Education

The human capital for the European Factories of the Future is the key enabler to competing in high value manufacturing. Therefore, the education and training schemes for young talents, supported by new and rapidly developing ICT technologies, have to be flexible and adaptable to the future manufacturing needs. New approaches for managing knowledge and developing skills will be required so that the manufacturing decision making can be dispersed in the production level. In order for the best of European human capital to be a center of attention, the weak societal appeal of manufacturing has to be overcome as evidenced in the decline of student interest in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects. The aim of the paper is to focus on a sample of current offer of serious games in manufacturing education. Although manufacturing education have been using simulations in facilitating a better understanding of the theoretical concepts, the transition to using serious games is prone to mistakes. This paper presents the comparative analysis of three existing serious games in manufacturing education, assessing the game design and pedagogical underpinnings of the serious games. The result of the analysis has yielded a set of guidelines that supports the development of serious games in manufacturing education

Bell-type inequalities for parametric families of triangular norms

summary:In recent work we have shown that the reformulation of the classical Bell inequalities into the context of fuzzy probability calculus leads to related inequalities on the commutative conjunctor used for modelling pointwise fuzzy set intersection. Also, an important role has been attributed to commutative quasi-copulas. In this paper, we consider these new Bell-type inequalities for continuous t-norms. Our contribution is twofold: first, we prove that ordinal sums preserve these Bell-type inequalities; second, for the most important parametric families of continuous Archimedean t-norms and each of the inequalities, we identify the parameter values such that the corresponding t-norms satisfy the inequality considered