How to Change Students‘ Conceptions of the Epistemology of Science

This paper is subdivided into two sections: In Part I empirical results of students epistemological conceptions of laws, hypotheses, theories, and models are presented as well as their ideas of the pathway of scientific discovery. These results are discussed in relation to research results of different recent publications. In Part II an outline and analysis of a two-year program for explicitly teaching epistemology in a physics course (grade 11-13) is given.     

Individuationsprozesse und interethnische Freundschaften bei Jugendlichen türkischer Herkunft

Individuation of Turkish immigrant youth – This study focuses on the relationship between interethnic friendships and individuation processes of Turkish immigrant youth. According to the individuation theory and additional information drawn from former research, interethnic friendships should influence the development of these adolescents’ autonomy. Data from 449 Turkish adolescents living in Germany (age 12 to 17) were used to test the theoretical model and give first insights into the relationship between Turkish-German friendships and individuation of immigrant youth. Results show that Turkish youth with German friends tend to develop different strives for autonomy. Yet, these conceptions of autonomy only effect family cohesion modestly.     

Probabilistic relevance ranking for collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering is concerned with making recommendations about items to users. Most formulations of the problem are specifically designed for predicting user ratings, assuming past data of explicit user ratings is available. However, in practice we may only have implicit evidence of user preference; and furthermore, a better view of the task is of generating a top-N list of items that the user is most likely to like. In this regard, we argue that collaborative filtering can be directly cast as a relevance ranking problem. We begin with the classic Probability Ranking Principle of information retrieval, proposing a probabilistic item ranking framework. In the framework, we derive two different ranking models, showing that despite their common origin, different factorizations reflect two distinctive ways to approach item ranking. For the model estimations, we limit our discussions to implicit user preference data, and adopt an approximation method introduced in the classic text retrieval model (i.e. the Okapi BM25 formula) to effectively decouple frequency counts and presence/absence counts in the preference data. Furthermore, we extend the basic formula by proposing the Bayesian inference to estimate the probability of relevance (and non-relevance), which largely alleviates the data sparsity problem. Apart from a theoretical contribution, our experiments on real data sets demonstrate that the proposed methods perform significantly better than other strong baselines.

The Relationship between Different Criteria for Admission to Medical School and Student Success

The relevance of admission policy for educational outcome in medical schools is demonstrated by means of longitudinal data on the total population of several cohorts of students admitted to the German medical schools on the basis of a variety of criteria (n = 28,000 students). The correlations between the quantitative criteria for admission and performance on the First Medical Examination (which takes place after 2–3 years of study) were calculated. Secondly, the mean total scores on this examination that have been achieved at first attempt by groups of students admitted according to different selection criteria were compared. Thirdly, the rates of success on the medical examination at first attempt after two years of study were compared for the above‐mentioned groups of students. The most striking result is the large difference between the groups under comparison in terms of their success rates in the First Medical Examination. The highest pass rates (80%) are achieved by students selected on the basis of a combination of the average mark in the secondary school leaving certificate and the total score on the ‘Test for Medical Studies’, an aptitude test. Had the students been admitted at random, they would only have attained a pass rate of 48% (base rate). For those admitted on the basis of the result of an interview or on the basis of ‘waiting‐time’ (i.e. the number of semesters they had spent queuing) the pass rates are 49 and 45%. The results are interpreted in the light of different political and educational goals that are or can be envisaged when decisions on admission strategies are made.     

Entstehungskontexte interethnischer Freundschaften in der Adoleszenz

Zusammenfassung Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird der Frage nachgegangen, in welchen Zusammenh?ngen Freundschaften zwischen deutschen und nicht-deutschen Jugendlichen entstehen. Die zentrale Vermutung ist, dass eine hohe Distanz zu Erwachsenen solche Freundschaften begünstigt, indem verst?rkt Sozialr?ume aufgesucht werden, in denen andersethnische Jugendliche die Abkehr von der Herkunftskultur erleichtern. Ferner wird postuliert, dass diese erh?hte Sozialraumorientierung interethnische Kontakte begünstigt, die ihrerseits wiederum die Wahrscheinlichkeit interethnischer Freundschaften erh?hen wird. Die Entstehung interethnischer Freundschaften wird in das theoretische Konzept des Moving (Sozialraumorientierung), Meeting (Kontakt) und Mating (Freundschaft) von Verbrugge (vgl. 1974) eingebettet. Auf jeder der drei Ebenen wird sodann der Versuch unternommen, Pr?diktoren zu identifizieren. die das Moving, Meeting und Mating begünstigen. Es wird ein theoretisches Modell vorgeschlagen, welches als Heuristik Entstehungszusammenh?nge interethnischer Freundschaften erkl?ren soll und einer ersten empirischen überprüfung unterzogen wird. Auf der Basis einer Pilotstudie sollen getrennt für deutsche und türkische Hauptschüler Gemeinsamkeiten und Differenzen bei der Entstehung solcher Freundschaften aufgezeigt und im Anschluss kritisch diskutiert werden. Summary Developmental contexts of interethnic friendships in adolescence This contribution focuses on contexts which promote the development of friendships between German and foreign adolescents. It is based on the assumption that high youth centrism and the associated distance to adults have a positive impact on these kinds of friendships, since such social spaces enable foreign youth to turn their backs on their own culture. It is further proposed that this increased orientation toward social spaces outside of the family promotes the likelihood of interethnic contact and accordingly of interethnic friendships. A theoretical approach, first developed by Verbrugge (1974), will be presented, which describes the development of interethnic friendships in the sequence of social domain activity („moving“), interethnic contacts („meeting“) and interethnic friendships („mating“). At each stage of this sequence, predictors will be sought which identify moving, meeting and mating. A heuristic model will be suggested, which can explain the developmental contexts of interethnic friendships and this will be tested using empirical data. On the basis of a pilot study, which will analyze German and Turkish pupils in one school type (Hauptschule), the differences and similarities in the development of such friendships will be demonstrated and critically discussed.

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„Ich habe nichts gegen Fremde, einige meiner besten Freunde sind Fremde, aber diese Fremden sind nicht von hier.“ Methusalix in 〉Das Geschenk Caesars〈

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Dieser Beitrag entstand im Rahmen des von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft mit Sachbeihilfen an den Autor gef?rderten Projekts „Freundschaftsbeziehungen in interethnischen Netzwerken“ (Az. Re 15669/31).     

Perception of the future and the future of perception

The definition of a problem and the action taken to solve it largely depend on the view which the individuals or groups that discovered the problem have of the system to which it refers. A problem may thus find itself defined as a badly interpreted output, or as a faulty output of a faulty output device, or as a faulty output due to a malfunction in an otherwise faultless system, or as a correct but undesired output from a faultless and thus undesirable system. All definitions but the last suggest corrective action; only the last definition suggests change, and so presents an unsolvable problem to anyone opposed to change (Herbert Brün, 1971).This article is an adaptation of an address given on March 29, 1971, at the opening of the Twenty-fourth Annual Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.     

Value orientations and action conflicts in students’ everyday life: An interview study

The assumption that today’s German students are able to successfully combine synthesis achievement values and well-being values appears to be overly optimistic when regarded from the perspective of motivational psychology. The results of a qualitative-quantitative interview study with 25 students indicate that achievement and well-being values may come into conflict in everyday life. Incentives for achievement and well-being rarely co-occur in the same action domains. Whereas the school context is dominated by achievement incentives, leisure time is dominated by well-being incentives. Since both achievement and well-being are appreciated by most students, they should be prone to experience frequent everyday action conflicts. The motivational characteristics of postdecisional action conflicts are described on the phenomenal level and their possible impairing effects for learning processes are pointed out. Finally, alternative forms of value synthesis, which might be realized more successfully, are discussed.     

Optofluidic in situ maskless lithography of charge selective nanoporous hydrogel for DNA preconcentration

An optofluidic maskless photopolymerization process was developed for in situ negatively charged nanoporous hydrogel [poly-AMPS (2-acrylamido-2-methyl-1-propanesulfonic acid)] fabrication. The optofluidic maskless lithography system, which combines a high power UV source and digital mirror device, enables fast polymerization of arbitrary shaped hydrogels in a microfluidic device. The poly-AMPS hydrogel structures were positioned near the intersections of two microchannels, and were used as a cation-selective filter for biological sample preconcentration. Preconcentration dynamics as well as the fabricated polymer shape were analyzed in three-dimensions using fluorescein sample and a confocal microscope. Finally, single-stranded DNA preconcentration was demonstrated for polymerase chain reaction-free signal enhancement.