Californian Science Students' Perceptions of their Classoom Learning Environments.

This study utilised the What Is Happening In this Class (WIHIC) questionnaire to examine factors that influence Californian student perceptions of their learning environment. Data were collected from 665 USA middle school science students in 11 Californian schools. Several background variables were included in the study to investigate their effects on students’ perceptions, such as student and teacher gender, student ethnic background and socio-economic status (SES), and student age. Class and school variables, such as class ethnic composition, class size and school socioeconomic status were also collected. A hierarchical analysis of variance was conducted to investigate separate and joint effects of these variables. Results from this study indicate that some scales of the WIHIC are more inclined to measure personal or idiosyncratic features of student perceptions of their learning environment whereas other scales contain more variance at the class level. Also, it was found that different variables affect different scale scores. A variable that consistently affected students' perceptions, regardless of the element of interest in the learning environment was student gender. Generally speaking girls perceived their learning environment more positively than did boys

Sport, War and Democracy in Classical Athens

This article concerns the paradox of athletics in classical Athens. Democracy may have opened up politics to every class of Athenian but it had little impact on sporting participation. The city’s athletes continued to drawn predominantly from the upper class. It comes as a surprise then that lower-class Athenians actually esteemed athletes above every other group in the public eye, honoured them very generously when they won, and directed a great deal of public and private money to sporting competitions and facilities. In addition athletics escaped the otherwise persistent criticism of upper-class activities in the popular culture of the democracy. The research of social scientists on sport and aggression suggests this paradox may have been due to the cultural overlap between athletics and war under the Athenian democracy. The article concludes that the practical and ideological democratization of war by classical Athens legitimized and supported upper-class sport