Understanding students’ learning practices: challenges for design and integration of mobile technology into distance education

This study explores the design requirements for mobile applications for second language learning in online/distance higher education settings. We investigate how students use technology and how they perceive that these technologies-in-practice facilitate their language learning. Structuration Theory is used for the analysis. Results show that design needs to consider that (i) students use their private mobile technologies frequently when conducting self-initiated learning tasks, (ii) students’ mobile technologies-in-practice are important, and course designers should design materials and tools for such use practices, and (iii) students prefer to work on their own due to the limited time they want to devote to their learning. Consequently, in regard to the pervasive nature of mobile technology integration in society and into students’ habitual use, they need various software tools on such devices to support individual learning.     

Recoding strategies of German learners of English as a foreign language

This study investigated whether German learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) acquire additional recoding strategies that they do not need for recoding in the consistent German orthography. Based on the psycholinguistic grain size theory (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005) we expected students with little experience in EFL to use the same small-grain recoding strategy as in German, while more advanced students were expected to switch flexibly between small and large grain size recoding strategies when reading English nonwords. German students in Grades 5, 7, and 9, as well as university students were presented with an experimental nonword reading paradigm introduced by Goswami, Ziegler, Dalton, and Schneider (2003) which assesses the effects of language (nonwords derived from German vs. English), orthographic neighborhood, item length and presentation format (blocked vs. mixed) on reading latencies and accuracies. The data were analyzed using hierarchical linear models. The youngest age group did not use larger units to read English nonwords, but mostly applied simple grapheme-phoneme translation, as they would in their first language. University students were able to switch flexibly between large- and small size recoding strategies.     

Can performance feedback during instruction boost knowledge acquisition? Contrasting criterion-based and social comparison feedback

Feedback indicating how well students are performing during a learning task can be very stimulating. In this study with a pre- and post-test design, the effects of two types of performance feedback on learning results were compared: feedback during a learning task was either stated in terms of how well the students were performing relative to other students (social comparison feedback) or relative to an absolute criterion (criterion-based feedback). Thirty-four students in secondary vocational engineering education were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In both conditions, students worked together in small groups. All groups completed a math learning task, during which they received either social comparison feedback or criterion-based performance feedback. The findings showed that the type of feedback had a strong effect on learning outcomes: the post-test scores and gains of students in the social comparison condition were significantly higher than those of students in the criterion-based feedback condition.     

Sportpartizipation in nordostdeutschen Landgemeinden in den Jahren 1973, 1994 und 2008

This article examines the development of sport participation in the rural peripheral area of northeast Germany over a time period of 35 years from modernization and transformation theoretical perspectives. The data are based on 3 healthcare surveys carried out in 1973, 1994 and 2004/2008 in the adult population of 14 rural communities. A comparison of the results of the surveys revealed that participation in sports increased from 23?% in the year 1973 to 55?% in 2004/2008. Women in particular showed an increased participation in sports. In 2004/2008 women had a 1.32 greater chance to be actively engaged in sport than men. In 1973 the chance of women actively engaged in sport to undertake 2 h per week was only half as high as men active in sport; however, sex differences in the extent of sport have leveled off over time. Age and education were associated with sport participation in all three time periods surveyed. In the 1970s the highest sport participation was in the group with an average level of education but in 1994 and 2004/2008 there was a social gradient with the highest participation in sports in the group with the highest education level. In 1973 a social gradient in sport participation could be observed depending on the income. Because sport participation in rural communities lies clearly below the average total German and also East German levels, despite positive developments and is still greatly dependent on sociodemographic features, it is suggested that this can be counteracted by sport developmental programs specific for rural peripheral areas.     

Age Stereotypes about Emotional Resilience at Work

In light of an aging workforce, age stereotypes have become an important topic both for researchers and for practitioners. Among other effects, age stereotypes might predict discriminatory behavior at work. This study examined stereotypic beliefs about emotional resilience as a function of both targets’ and judges’ age. In a web-based study, 4,181 persons between 15 and 87 years rated four targets (young male worker, young female worker, older male worker, older female worker) on emotional resilience in a work context. An age effect showed that older targets were rated lower on emotional resilience than younger targets. Moreover, older compared to younger judges provided more positive assessments of younger targets.     

Homotolerance and heteronormativity in Norwegian classrooms

This article is based on classroom observations and discusses sexual education that addresses homosexuality. Tolerance of queer lifestyles as well as support for judicial equality between heterosexual and homosexual couples is generally perceived as being high in the Norwegian political context. Norwegian sexual politics is, however, based on a binary understanding of sexuality, linked to stable and authentic sexual identities, and this perspective is highly influential in Norwegian education on sexuality. Homotolerance appears to be the most prominent ambition when teachers deal with homosexuality in their teaching. Informed by queer theory, I intend to investigate how teaching that sets out to create homotolerance reproduces heteronormativity. I will argue that even though education on homosexuality may create increased homotolerance, the very same education does also marginalise and stigmatise homosexuality as well as reproduce binary and heteronormative concepts of sexuality.     

Aufmerksamkeitsbewegungen

In this paper, we will develop a way of understanding attendance of courses, whichis not in the usual manner based on the institutionally marked dimension of incident, butinstead emphasizes the interactive dimension of process. From this perspective, the processesof adult education are less focused on the forms of pedagogic action or teaching-learning interaction. We rather observe the performance of participation and its shaping by the courseparticipants during the course process. In a critical reception of research on classroom management, perceivable shifts of attention will be argued to be constitutive moments in the process of attendance. On the basis of one course scene, we will show the way in which a process of participation—corporeal specified in space and time—can be empirically reconstructed as an arrangement of mutually entangled shifts of attention between the individual participants. This lesson is based on the assumption that individual learning and acquisition processes during a course lesson can only be appropriately understood and explained in the light of these social dynamics of attention.