The development and implementation of a concussion education program for high school student-athletes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Concussions are the most frequently occurring brain injury in sports (Carroll & Rosner, 2012), and the injury can be particularly problematic for adolescent athletes because of their developing brains (Carman et al., 2015). As a result, experts have highlighted the importance of improving athletes' knowledge of concussions to improve their health and safety (McCrory et al., 2013). Despite this, there is no consensus regarding the most effective way to disseminate concussion knowledge (Mrazik et al., 2015). The purpose of this dissertation was to develop and implement a concussion education program for high school student-athletes in Eastern Canada. This was accomplished through a cohesive series of four original manuscripts. The first manuscript was a review paper that investigated literature on concussion education programs. Results revealed there have been three types of concussion education programs to date: interactive oral presentations, educational videos, and computer-based learning programs. However, these interventions have been limited by the dissemination of knowledge at one time-point only and by minimally implementing qualitative methods. The second manuscript was a qualitative study that explored high school coaches' insights and perceptions of concussions. The coaches said they taught athletes skills during practices and games to improve their safety and well-being, which they said they valued more than winning championships. Coaches also mentioned that some of their athletes were occasionally disingenuous when reporting concussion symptoms. The third manuscript was a qualitative study that gathered high school athletes' insights on concussions, including the mediums through which they acquired information about the injury. Results revealed the high school athletes primarily acquired information about concussions through interactions with peers and family members, media reports involving professional athletes, and school projects. Additionally, the athletes noted they attempted to deceive coaches and health professionals about concussions, a finding that was related to the coaches' perceptions in study two. Results from the first three manuscripts were used to create a concussion education program for high school athletes. Thus, the fourth manuscript investigated a concussion education program for high school athletes, which consisted of four interactive oral presentations that were evaluated using a mixed method design. The results revealed improvements in participants' knowledge of concussions after exposure to the concussion education program. Participants also indicated the concussion education program might influence their future in-game behaviors, such as avoiding dangerous collisions. Furthermore, the athletes said they enjoyed the interactive nature of the presentations and the use of case study examples. In sum, this dissertation contributes to the research and practice of concussion education in many ways. To our knowledge, it is the first program of research to systematically develop and implement a concussion education program for high school athletes. Results from this dissertation indicated that interactive oral presentations were an effective strategy to disseminate concussion information to high school athletes, and provides recommendations for future research in this still underdeveloped domain.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".