Struggles and strategies in anaerobic and aerobic cycling tests: A mixed-method approach with a focus on tailored self-regulation strategies

Endurance sports pose a plethora of mental demands that exercisers have to deal with. Unfortunately, investigations of exercise-specific demands and strategies to deal with them are insufficiently researched, leading to a gap in knowledge about athletic requirements and strategies used to deal with them. Here, we investigated which obstacles exercisers experience during an anaerobic (Wingate test) and an aerobic cycling test (incremental exercise test), as well as the strategies they considered helpful for dealing with these obstacles (qualitative analysis). In addition, we examined whether thinking of these obstacles and strategies in terms of if-then plans (or implementation intentions; i.e., “If I encounter obstacle O, then I will apply strategy S!”) improves performance over merely setting performance goals (i.e., goal intentions; quantitative analysis). N = 59 participants (age: M = 23.9 ± 6.5 years) performed both tests twice in a 2-within (Experimental session: 1 vs. 2) × 2-between (Condition: goal vs. implementation intention) design. Exercisers’ obstacles and strategies were assessed using structured interviews in Session 1 and subjected to thematic analysis. In both tests, feelings of exertion were the most frequently stated obstacle. Motivation to do well, self-encouragement, and focus on the body and on cycling were frequently stated strategies in both tests. There were also test-specific obstacles, such as boredom reported in the aerobic test. For session 2, the obstacles and strategies elicited in Session 1 were used to specify if-then plans. Bayesian mixed-factor ANOVA suggests, however, that if-then plans did not help exercisers to improve their performance. These findings shed novel light into the mental processes accompanying endurance exercise and the limits they pose on performance.

Effectiveness of entrepreneurship quality education in higher educational institutions: A mediating effect of entrepreneurial training

The main aim of this study is to assess the effectiveness of entrepreneurship quality education in higher education institutions in Indonesia on entrepreneurial goal intentions with the mediating effect of entrepreneurial training. The research followed the quantitative research design as the researcher collected data based on numeric facts. The sample size was 314 participants and a test was carried out on Smart PLS. The results were based on the measurement model to test the factor loadings, validity and reliability, path assessment, and the blindfolding technique which were mainly used for assessing the predictive relevance of the model. The findings of the study suggest that entrepreneurial training mediates entrepreneurship quality education programs in higher education institutions in Indonesia with entrepreneurial goal intentions.

Intention Nets: Psychology-Inspired User Choice Behavior Modeling for Next-Basket Prediction

Human behaviors are complex, which are often observed as a sequence of heterogeneous actions. In this paper, we take user choices for shopping baskets as a typical case to study the complexity of user behaviors. Most of existing approaches often model user behaviors in a mechanical way, namely treating a user action sequence as homogeneous sequential data, such as hourly temperatures, which fails to consider the complexity in user behaviors. In fact, users' choices are driven by certain underlying intentions (e.g., feeding the baby or relieving pain) according to Psychological theories. Moreover, the durations of intentions to drive user actions are quite different; some of them may be persistent while others may be transient. According to Psychological theories, we develop a hierarchical framework to describe the goal, intentions and action sequences, based on which, we design Intention Nets (IntNet). In IntNet, multiple Action Chain Nets are constructed to model the user actions driven by different intentions, and a specially designed Persistent-Transient Intention Unit models the different intention durations. We apply the IntNet to next-basket prediction, a recent challenging task in recommender systems. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show the superiority of our Psychology-inspired model IntNet over the state-of-the-art approaches.

Testing an Adapted Model of Social Cognitive Career Theory: Findings and Implications for a Self-Selected, Diverse Middle-School Sample

We tested an adapted version of social-cognitive career theory (SCCT; Lent et al., 1994, 2000) with a self-selected, diverse sample of middle-school students attending a Saturday STEM Academy asking, “Is SCCT valid for examining career choice goal-intentions among a sample of students already expressing interest in math and science-related subjects and careers?” According to SCCT, choosing a STEM-related career involves the complex interplay of personal and contextual factors, many of which become increasingly salient during the middle-school years. There is reason to believe that SCCT may function differently for students who are self-selected, such as those found in the present sample. Main findings in the full regression model showed that math/science motivation (T1), family support for engineering (T1), outcome expectancies (T2), and interest (T2) were significant predictors of (T2) goal intentions; whereas self-efficacy was non-significant as has been shown in much previous research. Relatedly, we found several measurement issues with the SCCT variables among this sample, thus partially answering the larger research question. Implications of the present findings and suggestions for future research are discussed in the context of the career-choice literature, theoretical and practical implications of SCCT, and relatedly, possible measurement issues arising from using SCCT with self-selected, middle-school samples.

Student Cognitive Motivation: The Mediating Role of Self-Reactive Influences on the Relationship Between Negative Feedback and Intended Effort

This study examined college students’ cognitive motivation based on goal intentions in the context of negative performance–goal discrepancies. Specifically, an integrated model of intended effort was developed to further understand the relationships between negative performance–goal discrepancies, self-reactive influences, and intended effort toward the next proximal goal. We explored these relationships within an authentic achievement-oriented setting by using actual exam performance with a sample of 451 undergraduate students. Primary results from a path analysis suggest that, among other things, future affective self-evaluation is more predictive of intended effort than performance–goal discrepancy or self-efficacy toward original goal attainment. Implications are primarily intended for those interested in fostering students’ cognitive motivation.