Over the last ten years, the gap in swimming participation between Whites and other minority groups has been well documented. Moreover, the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and structural constraints to swimming participation by African Americans have been clearly delineated. With the challenges surrounding the minority swimming gap acknowledged, the impetus should now be on creating strategies to rectify the problem. This paper argues for a collective effort on the part of the African American community to ameliorate the swimming gap, thus lessening the senseless deaths associated with it. In the paper, strategic actions are outlined including advocacy and the creation of viable partnerships to bridge the swimming gap. Most notably, the authors applaud the efforts of African American swimming luminaries such as Cullen Jones and many others who continue to articulate the importance and urgency of African Americans learning to swim but surmise that they cannot do the "heavy lifting" by themselves to encourage and inspire African Americans to learn to swim. Organizations such as the National Urban League (NUL), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Congressional Black Caucus and media moguls such as Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, and Mo'Nique are encouraged to join forces with the NUL and NAACP in developing a broad-based initiative to promote learning to swim. In summary, the authors argue that the African American community must play a significant role in developing solutions to curb drownings and close the swimming gap.
The appointment of sport chaplains in public colleges or universities can be controversial and contested as in a recent case at Iowa State University. Some scholarly attention has been paid to the relationship between sport and religion, but studies on sport chaplains are just recently emerging. Through textual analysis of media coverage and promotional materials, this study examines how collegiate sport chaplains, their ministry organizations, and public universities navigate the competing interests of evangelical chaplains and state-funded institutions. The study explores the roles and responsibilities of collegiate sport chaplains at two public universities (University of Tennessee and Auburn University). It also provides a brief review of the historical context of muscular Christianity for the discussion of collegiate sport chaplaincy.
Participants (115 low-socioeconomic-status [SES], inner-city, high-school students) were exposed to three reading conditions: (1) a control condition in which students silently read brief selected passages; (2) an experimental condition in which students were prompted to perform a three-part (Ask, Read, and Tell [ART]) comprehension enhancement exercise before, during, and after reading the selected passages; and (3) another experimental condition in which ART was followed by peer discussion (PD) of the reading. Students answered 10 comprehension questions after reading passages under each condition, which served as the dependent variable. Results of a repeatedmeasures analysis of variance revealed a significant main effect, and follow-up analysis showed significantly higher levels of comprehension on ART + PD passages relative to either the control or ART passages. Discussion focuses on using PD to enhance comprehension and future research to determine which combination of intervention components are necessary to occasion enhanced comprehension. C 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Proficient reading is thought to develop via a hierarchical process of skill development that includes phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension (
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.