Welche schulischen Merkmale beeinflussen die Unterrichtsqualität? Sekundäranalysen auf Grundlage von Schulinspektionsdaten

The present study examines the assumption of positive correlations between certain characteristics of school organization (goals, organization and human resources) and teaching quality. Therefore, inspection data from the Brandenburg school inspection are examined. These data are suitable due to the wide coverage of school and teaching characteristics and the fact that data from approximate all public schools is available. The results confirm positive correlations between school characteristics and teaching quality at the school level in the range of small to medium effects. Moreover, with an increase in school characteristics, the variation of teaching quality within a school decreases (small effects). The study provides evidence on potentials and limitations of inspection data for school quality research and the optimization of current inspection instruments.     

红红小车

漫漫人生路,有谁能说自己没有过万念俱灰的时候?逢及“破屋偏遭连阴雨,漏船又遇打头风”的时刻,再理智的人有时也会一时想不开,觉得命运对自己太不公,觉得活着没意思。可是只要我们看到孩子那灿烂的笑脸,看到孩子长大了、懂事了、有出息了,所有的绝望似乎立刻便烟消云散了。这种体验,正如作者表述的:三个天真无邪、永远乐观向上的小天使,一声“妈咪,明天事情会好起来的”又一次将我从悲观和绝望中拉回到他们乐观的世界中来。19世纪20年代末30年代初的那次经济大萧条,使美国人迷茫与绝望。有谁能想到,在那个特殊的时期,重新给人们带去欢乐与笑声的竟然是一位5岁大的孩子——天才童星秀兰·邓波儿就连罗斯福总统也感谢她“在大萧条时期为千千万万的美国人带来微笑”。孩子便是这世上的一束阳光,将我们的心儿照亮。虽然大人们常常会觉得孩子们那些新奇的想法无知、幼稚,但他们身上的那份乐观,又何尝不给我们一些启示呢?     

Cause and causality in daycare research: An investigation of group differences in Swedish child care

One of the most important goals of child care research has been to determine whether or not nonparental care has adverse effects on child development. Answering this question involves making causal attributions about the origins of differences between groups of children who have experienced divergent nonparental care arrangements. Some of the problems researchers face when trying to demonstrate causal relationships are illustrated in this paper using data from the Göteborg Child Care Study, a comprehensive, prospective, longitudinal study comparing the developmental trajectories of children in exclusive home care, family daycare, and center daycare. It is argued that the discovery of significant differences between groups must initiate extensive efforts to validate and interpret the findings. Focusing on the specific characteristics of prospective longitudinal studies, the article shows what measures can be taken to avoid the misinterpretation of group differences that are actually attributable to pre-selection effects or confounding variables. By rigorously identifying such confounds, researchers can accumulate support for hypothesized causal relationships, but they cannot ‘prove’ them because unknown and unmeasured confounding variables may always have important effects.     

An Adaptive Bayesian Lasso Approach with Spike-and-Slab Priors to Identify Multiple Linear and Nonlinear Effects in Structural Equation Models

In applied research, such as with motivation theories, typically many variables are theoretically implied predictors of an outcome and several interactions are assumed (e.g., Watt, 2004). However, estimation problems that might arise when several interaction and/or quadratic effects are analyzed simultaneously have not been investigated because simulation studies on interaction effects in the structural equation modeling framework have mainly focused on small models that contain single interaction effects. In this article, we show that traditional approaches can provide estimates with low accuracy when complex models are estimated. We introduce an adaptive Bayesian lasso approach with spike-and-slab priors that overcomes this problem. Using a complex model in a simulation study, we show that the parameter estimates of the proposed approach are more accurate in situations with high multicollinearity or low reliability compared with a standard Bayesian lasso approach and typical frequentist approaches (i.e., unconstrained product indicator approach and latent moderated structures approach).     

Wie die Türken in unsere Köpfe kamen. Das Türkei-Bild in der deutschen Pädagogik zwischen 1820 und 1930

The article reconstructs the image of Turkey and the Turks that German education portrayed between 1820 and 1930. The analysis is based on educational periodicals and reference works from the historical eras of the German Confederation, the German Empire and the First World War, tracing the way old stereotypes persisted and new stereotypes arose. The study especially focuses on the opinions of German educationalists about schools in Turkey, Turkish women, Islam, the question of whether Turkey was part of Europe, and last not least on whether Ottoman educational policies were appropriate. Closely following the historical sources, the article shows how the opinions of German educationists changed according to the shift of Germany’s geopolitical interests, how their outlook went hand in hand with the views of the general press, and how they gradually came to a professional self-concept that contrasted ‘their’ educational system with what they believed was a ‘backward’ system in Turkey. At the same time they began to develop an interest in doing professional work in Turkey. The article can also be regarded as a contribution to the history of educational thinking in Germany in the course of the nineteenth century.     

Primary Education in Sub-Saharan Africa--a moral issue,an economic matter,or both?

Generally, it is argued that economic factors explain changes in literacy and enrolment rates in sub-Saharan Africa. This article demonstrates that educational indicators vary as much with religious factors, i.e. degree of Islamisation and Christianisation, as with economic factors. Forty years ago, strongly Christianised countries had higher rates of literacy and primary school enrolment than strongly Islamised countries, regardless of economic level, typpe of state and colonial background, and they still have. The article ends with a number of assumptions which can serve as an agenda for research on educational development in sub-Saharan Africa.     

Output-sensitive autocompletion search

We consider the following autocompletion search scenario: imagine a user of a search engine typing a query; then with every keystroke display those completions of the last query word that would lead to the best hits, and also display the best such hits. The following problem is at the core of this feature: for a fixed document collection, given a set D of documents, and an alphabetical range W of words, compute the set of all word-in-document pairs (w, d) from the collection such that w ∈ W and d ∈ D. We present a new data structure with the help of which such autocompletion queries can be processed, on the average, in time linear in the input plus output size, independent of the size of the underlying document collection. At the same time, our data structure uses no more space than an inverted index. Actual query processing times on a large test collection correlate almost perfectly with our theoretical bound.

Radicalism in composition pedagogy

For the Record

Radicalism in composition pedagogy     

Einstellungen,Motivation und Selbstwirksamkeit von Lehrkräften

Teachers’ attitudes, motivation and self-efficacy are aspects of their professional competence affecting students’ motivation and learning via instructional behavior. In the present study, school type-specific differences in these teacher competencies and their relation to instruction when teaching with texts and integrated pictures are analyzed, further focusing on effects of school subject and teaching experience. Teachers (N?=?265) of primary school, lower and upper track secondary school filled in questionnaires. Primary school teachers were less intrinsically motivated to teach text-picture integration than secondary school teachers. They showed more negative attitudes towards texts with pictures than upper track teachers and avoided discussing the picture to a higher degree. All teacher characteristics predicted instructional behavior, further school type-specific effects of the subject occurred. The results provide starting points for teacher training and the potential for further research concerning the support of students in class.