An Evaluation of Certain Areas of Physical Education Service Programs of Selected White and Negro Colleges in Tennessee

During World War II inadequacies in physical education programs in the United States were clearly revealed. A study of the physical fitness of men in the Army Air Force disclosed that almost one-half of the inductees were in poor or very poor condition. The Army and Navy testing programs also revealed that a large percentage of inductees was in poor physical condition. These test results did not include the numerous persons who were rejected from military service for various reasons. Most of the men displayed poor performance in basic motor skills such as jumping, falling and lifting. It was also discovered that nearly one-half of the men did not possess a sufficient degree of skill in any sport to desire participation in that activity. These tests indicated that physical education programs in the country had not fulfilled such objectives as physical development or physical fitness and the development of recreational skills such as golf, tennis, swimming and badminton. Although much was done following World War II to improve this situation, physical education practice still continued to lag far behind current knowledge and philosophy. Recently it has been pointed out that Americans are becoming physically soft because of a high degree of mechanization in industry and everyday life with a resulting lack of adequate physical exertion to maintain body fitness. It has also been emphasized that if too many persons become soft and weak, the the nation itself may eventually acquire these same characteristics. It is the responsibility of physical educators to do their utmost to prevent the degeneration of physical fitness in American youth and adults. Improved programs of physical education should aid in increasing the strength and health of individuals and ultimately the strength of the nation. One method of improving physical education is through continuous evaluations of present physical education programs on all levels, elementary through college, in order to discover and as nearly as possible to eliminate deficiencies. Along with evaluations of individual programs, a comparison with other programs may prove helpful in discovering deficiencies with need to be corrected

Accounting for Citizenship: Are our expectations for civic education too modest?

In an era of tests and standards, how do our schools score in preparing citizens? Are any superintendents worrying about their jobs because of low civic scores on state assessments? There is no more central purpose to schools in a democracy than the preparation of citizens, yet you would hardly know it from how we hold these key public institutions accountable. Questions about the health of our civic life underlie many of today\u27s central campaign issues, from taxes to foreign policy. What sort of democracy are we, and what do we expect every citizen to be able to do

Communal Participatory Action Research as a Strategy for Improving Universities and the Social Sciences: Penn\u27s Work With the West Philadelphia Improvement Corps as a Case Study

As the 20th century closes, a key question is: What can the social sciences do to help solve the problems of our society and world? The authors identify the principal causes of the crisis in the university and the social sciences to be intellectual fragmentation and a structural contradiction that is built into the American research university. They then propose a radical reorientation of American universities toward helping solve real-world problems-particularly those in a university\u27s local community. The authors suggest that such an orientation can be achieved through communal participatory action research projects designed to help change society. This research strategy, they argue, will significantly advance both general knowledge and human welfare. The article explores, in detail, a communal participatory action research project initiated at the University of Pennsylvania and draws conclusions from this case study that might be applied in other research projects

Observed efficiency of a d-optimal design in an interactive agency choice experiment

There have been a number of recent calls within the choice literature to examine the role of social interactions upon preference formation. McFadden (2001a,b) recently stated that this area should be a high priority research agenda for choice modellers. Manski (2000) has also came to a similar conclusion and offered a plea for better data to assist in understanding the role of interactions between social agents. The interactive agency choice experiment (IACE) methodology represents a recent development in the area of discrete choice directed towards these pleas (see e.g., Brewer and Hensher 2000). The study of the influences that group interactions have upon choice bring with them not only issues that need to be overcome in terms of modelling, but also in terms of setting up the stated choice experiment itself. Currently, the state of practice in experimental design centres on orthogonal designs (Alpizar et al., 2003), which are suitable when applied to surveys with a large sample size. In a stated choice experiment involving interdependent freight stakeholders in Sydney (see Hensher and Puckett 2007, Puckett et al. 2007, Puckett and Hensher 2008), one significant empirical constraint was difficulty in recruiting unique decision-making groups to participate. The expected relatively small sample size led us to seek an alternative experimental design. That is, we decided to construct an optimal design that utilised extant information regarding the preferences and experiences of respondents, to achieve statistically significant parameter estimates under a relatively low sample size (see Rose and Bliemer, 2006). The D-efficient experimental design developed for the study is unique, in that it centred on the choices of interdependent respondents. Hence, the generation of the design had to account for the preferences of two distinct classes of decision makers: buyers and sellers of road freight transport. This paper discusses the process by which these (non-coincident) preferences were used to seed the generation of the experimental design, and then examines the relative power of the design through an extensive bootstrap analysis of increasingly restricted sample sizes for both decision-making classes in the sample. We demonstrate the strong potential for efficient designs to achieve empirical goals under sampling constraints, whilst identifying limitations to their power as sample size decreases

Modelling heterogeneity in scale directly: implications for estimates of influence in freight decision-making groups

The state of practice in the modelling of heterogeneous preferences does not separate the effects of scale from estimated mean and standard deviation preference measures. This restriction could lead to divergent behavioural implications relative to a flexible modelling structure that accounts for scale effects independently of estimated distributions of preference measures. The generalised multinomial logit (GMNL) model is such an econometric tool, enabling the analyst to identify the role that scale plays in impacting estimated sample mean and standard deviation preference measures, including confirming whether the appropriate model form approaches standard cases such as mixed logit. The GMNL model is applied in this paper to compare the behavioural implications of the minimum information group inference (MIGI) model within a study of interdependent road freight stakeholders in Sydney, Australia. MIGI estimates within GMNL models are compared with extant mixed logit measures (see Hensher and Puckett, 2008) to confirm whether the implications of the restrictive (with respect to scale) mixed logit model are consistent to those from the more flexible GMNL model. The results confirm the overall implication that transporters appear to hold relative power over supply chain responses to variable road-user charges. However, the GMNL model identifies a broader range of potential group decision-making outcomes and a restricted set of attributes over which heterogeneity in group influence is found than the mixed logit model. Hence, this analysis offers evidence that failing to account for scale heterogeneity may result in inaccurate representations of the bargaining set, and the nature of preference heterogeneity, in general

Selective developments in choice analysis and a reminder about the dimensionality of behavioural analysis

Developments in data and modeling paradigms in choice analysis are occurring at a fast pace. A review of activity leading up to each IATBR conference shows progress on many fronts. This paper takes a selective view of some of these developments, especially those that have been close to the research program of the authors. We focus on four broad themes – information processing strategies, especially in the context of stated choice studies; agency interdependency (with a strong applied focus), developments in the design of choice experiments, and a smorgasbord of themes centered on expanding the behavioral capabilities (and longer term forecasting accuracy) of discrete choice models, especially in terms of their recognition of ways of accommodating the other themes in the paper

Extending stated choice analysis to recognise agentspecific attribute endogeneity in bilateral group negotiation and choice: A think piece

This paper is a think piece on variations in the structure of stated preference studies when modelling the joint preferences of interacting agents who have the power to influence the attribute levels on offer. The approach proposed is an extension of standard stated choice methods. Known as ‘stated endogenous attribute level’ (SEAL) analysis, it allows for interactive agents to adjust attribute levels off a base stated choice specification that are within their control, in an effort to reach agreement in an experimental setting. This accomplishes three goals: (1) the ability to place respondents in an environment that more closely matches interactive settings in which some attribute levels are endogenous to a specific agent, should the modeller wish to capture such behaviour; (2) the improved ability of the modeller to capture the behaviour in such settings, including a greater wealth of information on the related interaction processes, rather than simply outcomes; and (3) the expansion of the set of situations that the modeller can investigate using experimental data

Recent Decisions

Comments on recent decisions by Frank P. Maggio, Paul Driscoll, Richard H. Puckett, John F. Costello, Harold E. McKee, and Edmund John Adams

Prior Authorization Requirements for Proprotein Convertase Subtilisin/Kexin Type 9 Inhibitors Across US Private and Public Payers

A comprehensive review of prior authorization (PA) requirements for a new class of expensive cholesterol-lowering drugs known as proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9) inhibitors has found unusually complex and burdensome demands across public and private insurance plans in the United States. These findings raise concerns that current policies may create undue barriers to care even in medically appropriate patients, particularly since requirements were just as stringent for patients with a genetic condition that creates more clear-cut eligibility for PCSK9 inhibitor treatment