Book review

Miteinander Reden: Kommunikationspsychologie für Führungskräfte (Talking with another: Communication psychology for leaders). by F. Schulz von Thun, J. Ruppel and R. Stratmann (2000), Reinbek, RoRoRo Sachbuch 60687, ISBN 3 499 60687 9, DM 16.90.     

DEVELOPMENT, EVALUATION, AND VALIDATION OF A PAPER-AND-PENCIL TEST FOR MEASURING TWO COMPONENTS OF BIOLOGY TEACHERS’ PEDAGOGICAL CONTENT KNOWLEDGE CONCERNING THE “CARDIOVASCULAR SYSTEM”

One main focus of teacher education research concentrates on teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). It has been shown that teachers’ PCK correlates with teaching effectiveness as well as with students’ achievement gains. Teachers’ PCK should be analyzed as one of the main important components to evaluate professional development programs. On this account, it is necessary to develop standardized measures of biology teachers’ topic-specific PCK that are labor-efficient. This paper presents a study on the development, evaluation, and validation of a paper-and-pencil test to measure biology teachers’ declarative PCK on the topic of blood and the human cardiovascular system. The development of the test was based, among other considerations, on a review of research literature on PCK and an analysis of 50 videotaped biology lessons. The final test instrument was comprised of 15 items distributed across 2 scales. The findings of the main study—with 93 preservice and in-service biology teachers and 12 biologists—confirmed that this measure of biology teachers’ declarative PCK was reliable, objective, and valid. In-service biology teachers scored higher on the test than preservice teachers (effect size Cohen’s d, 0.65) on one hand and, also, than biologists (Cohen’s d, 1.00) on the other hand. Future versions of this test should explore enlarging the scales and measuring procedural aspects of PCK.     

Participants' Roles in the Context of a Video Club

This study examines the nature of teacher participation in the context of a video club. Video clubs are professional development meetings in which teachers watch and discuss excerpts of video from their classrooms. In this study, I adopt a situative perspective to examine how teachers develop in their participation to accomplish the goals of the video club. In particular, I examine the roles participants play and explore teachers' participation in four roles that correspond with key goals of the video club. Analysis revealed that teachers' participation shifted in qualitatively different ways over time, with the teachers coming to prompt the group to discuss student mathematical thinking, to propose a variety of interpretations of student ideas, to build on one another's ideas, and to challenge one another's thinking in order to advance the group's conversations. This analysis suggests that the group learned how to participate in roles central to accomplishing the goals of the video club. Studying teacher learning through a lens of participation provides insight into the ways in which teachers coordinate themselves to engage with the goals of professional development and has implications for designing professional development that helps teachers develop practices for teaching mathematics for understanding.     

Developing Service Area Indices for Community Colleges: California's Method and Experience

The economic, educational and social environments of the students served by a community college are important factors in college performance accountability, policy analysis, program evaluation, and strategic planning. For example, previous research shows that income per county is a significant predictor of transfer rates for community colleges. However, conditions for the actual geographic area of the students served by a community college may differ, for various reasons, from the economic conditions for the county in which the college is located. This article describes the development of institutional or college-level indices as an enhancement to county-level data, their use as adjustment variables for California's Accountability Reporting for the Community Colleges (ARCC), and their applicability to other research and planning studies. The service area indices are created by combining the enrollment patterns of students by ZIP Code of residence with ZCTA (ZIP Code Tabulation Area) level economic and educational data from Census 2000.     

Measurement Bias Detection Through Factor Analysis

Assessing the correctness of a structural equation model is essential to avoid drawing incorrect conclusions from empirical research. In the past, the chi-square test was recommended for assessing the correctness of the model but this test has been criticized because of its sensitivity to sample size. As a reaction, an abundance of fit indexes have been developed. The result of these developments is that structural equation modeling packages are now producing a large list of fit measures. One would think that this progression has led to a clear understanding of evaluating models with respect to model misspecifications. In this article we question the validity of approaches for model evaluation based on overall goodness-of-fit indexes. The argument against such usage is that they do not provide an adequate indication of the “size” of the model's misspecification. That is, they vary dramatically with the values of incidental parameters that are unrelated with the misspecification in the model. This is illustrated using simple but fundamental models. As an alternative method of model evaluation, we suggest using the expected parameter change in combination with the modification index (MI) and the power of the MI test.     

Testing Inequality Constrained Hypotheses in SEM Models

Researchers often have expectations that can be expressed in the form of inequality constraints among the parameters of a structural equation model. It is currently not possible to test these so-called informative hypotheses in structural equation modeling software. We offer a solution to this problem using Mplus. The hypotheses are evaluated using plug-in p values with a calibrated alpha level. The method is introduced and its utility is illustrated by means of an example.