Effects of Motivation, Basic Psychological Needs, and Teaching Competence on Disruptive Behaviours in Secondary School Physical Education Students

Currently, disruptive and aggressive behaviours of a physical and verbal nature are a reality among adolescent students and a concern in the educational context. Therefore, the main objective of this research was to analyse the effects of perceived teaching competence, motivation and basic psychological needs on disruptive behaviours in secondary school PE students. The sample was composed of 758 adolescent students from seven public secondary schools. The following instruments adapted to physical education were used: The Disruptive Behaviours Questionnaire, The Evaluation of Teaching Competencies Scale, The Sport Motivation Scale, and The Basic Psychological Needs Scale. Multilevel regression models with the MIXED procedure were performed for data analysis. The results show that misbehaviour is more likely among male students and that disruptive behaviours decrease when a teacher is perceived as competent. Students with greater self-determined motivation are more likely to exhibit fewer behaviours related to low engagement and irresponsibility while amotivation increases the different disruptive behaviours in the classroom. In conclusion, it is proposed that educators work in line with the students’ needs by responding to their interests and that this will increase self-determined motivation

NNLO non-resonant corrections to threshold top-pair production from e+ e- collisions: Endpoint-singular terms

We analyse the subleading non-resonant contributions to the e+ e- -> W+ W- b bbar cross section at energies near the top-antitop threshold. These correspond to next-to-next-to-leading-order (NNLO) corrections with respect to the leading-order resonant result. We show that these corrections produce 1/epsilon endpoint singularities which precisely cancel the finite-width divergences arising in the resonant production of the W+ W- b bbar final state from on-shell decays of the top and antitop quarks at the same order. We also provide analytic results for the (m_t/Lambda)^2, (m_t/Lambda) and (m_t/Lambda)^0 log(Lambda) terms that dominate the expansion in powers of (Lambda/m_t) of the complete set of NNLO non-resonant corrections, where Lambda is a cut imposed on the invariant masses of the b W pairs that is neither too tight nor too loose (m_t Gamma_t << Lambda^2 << m_t^2).Comment: 36 pages, 6 figures. v2: minor title change and a few trivial corrections (mostly language) in accordance with the version published in PR

On the minimality of the order p^6 chiral Lagrangian

A method to find relations between the operators in the mesonic Lagrangian of Chiral Perturbation Theory at order p^6 is presented. The procedure can be used to establish if the basis of operators in the Lagrangian is minimal. As an example, we apply the method to the two-flavour case in the absence of scalar and pseudo-scalar sources (s=p=0), and conclude that the minimal Lagrangian contains 27 independent operators.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figure