Assessment drives learning: The effect of central exit exams on curricular knowledge and mathematical literacy

In this paper, we use data from the German PISA 2003 sample to study the effects of central exit examinations on student performance and student attitudes. Unlike earlier studies we use (i) a value-added measure to pin down the effect of central exit exams on learning in the last year before the exam and (ii) separate test scores for mathematical literacy and curriculum-based knowledge. The findings indicate that central exit exams improve curriculum-based knowledge but do not affect mathematical literacy. Students, although showing a better performance, are less intrinsically motivated in school.     

Learning to promote health at an emergency care department: identifying expansive and restrictive conditions

This article reports on the findings of a planned workplace health promotion intervention, and the aim is to identify conditions that facilitated or restricted the learning to promote health at an emergency care department in a Swedish hospital. The study had a longitudinal design, with interviews before and after the intervention and follow-up interviews one year after the intervention. Data were collected through individual interviews with employees and managers, in total 69 interviews. In addition, data were collected from documents. The study provided insight into conditions which were found to act as expansive and restrictive reinforcements for learning to promote health. The conclusion is that the workplace health promotion intervention was shaped by conditions that existed outside the local workplace level which restricted the workplace health promotion. Nevertheless, collective employee-driven activities had the capacity to facilitate learning for change in order to create a health-promoting workplace. The advantage of combining theories of learning and workplace health promotion provided a holistic analytical view of learning to promote health at work and helped to uncover and monitor changed conditions during a planned workplace health promotion intervention.     

Metacognitive knowledge in children at early elementary school

In metacognition research, many studies focused on metacognitive knowledge of preschoolers or children at the end of elementary school or secondary school, but investigations of children starting elementary school are quite limited. The present study, thus, took a closer look at children’s knowledge about mental processes and strategies in early elementary school aiming to extend findings on the respective age period. Therefore, at first, a new test that can be administered in group settings and that assesses a broad concept of children’s metacognitive knowledge in early elementary school was evaluated. Furthermore, analyses on the structure of metacognitive knowledge were carried out in cross-sectional as well as longitudinal analyses. In a longitudinal design, the new test instrument was administered to 870 children at the end of first grade and again one year later (N?=?720). Item Response models were used to evaluate the construct validity of the test. Test characteristics were checked based on different fit statistics, test fairness, and discriminant validity. In summary, the test exhibited good psychometric properties. Analyses on the dimensionality of the assessed metacognitive knowledge revealed that different strategies seemed to form rather distinct dimensions of metacognitive knowledge. However, these dimensions showed a rather homogeneous development from first to second grade. Impacts of the findings on theoretical considerations and on the theoretical understanding of metacognitive knowledge and further analyses with metacognitive competence data are discussed.     

Ein Beitrag zur systematischen Sportgeräteentwicklung

Sporting goods companies face significant challenges. As a result, the importance of a structured and systematic product development process has increased. There are several paradigms to support the product development, with the integrated product development paradigm as one of the most important ones. This study aims at the verification of an efficient application of Integrated Product Development for the development of sports equipment. For that purpose Insider Action Research is used. Three different case studies (leisure, fun and professional sports market) were conducted and analysed. To objectify the results, objective and subjective efficiency criteria were defined. The results show a positive evaluation of the criteria. So far, the development projects have been performed in an academic context only.     

Integrating Constrained Experiments in Long-Term Human–Robot Interaction Using Task- and Scenario-Based Prototyping

In order to investigate how the use of robots may impact everyday tasks, twelve participants in our study interacted with a University of Hertfordshire Sunflower robot over a period of 8 weeks in the university's Robot House. Participants performed two constrained tasks, one physical and one cognitive, four times over this period. Participant responses were recorded using a variety of measures including the System Usability Scale and the NASA Task Load Index. The use of the robot had an impact on the experienced workload of the participants di?erently for the two tasks, and this e?ect changed over time. In the physical task, there was evidence of adaptation to the robot's behavior. For the cognitive task, the use of the robot was experienced as more frustrating in the later weeks.     

Longitudinal trajectories of ethnic identity among urban Black and Latino adolescents

The current study modeled developmental trajectories of ethnic identity exploration and affirmation and belonging from middle to late adolescence (ages 15-18) and examined how these trajectories varied according to ethnicity, gender, immigrant status, and perceived level of discrimination. The sample consisted of 135 urban low-income Black and Latino adolescents (42% male, 34% Black, 66% Latino). Consistent with developmental theory, individual growth modeling identified an average quadratic trajectory of ethnic identity exploration characterized by decelerating levels of exploration after 10th grade. However, ethnicity and perceived discrimination by peers moderated this pattern. No uniform growth pattern in affirmation was found and Black and Latino adolescents displayed equally high levels of affirmation over time.     

Prenatal parental education from the perspective of fathers with experience as primary caregiver immediately following birth: a phenomenographic study

The aim of this phenomenographic study was to capture fathers' conceptions of parental education topics, illuminated by their experiences as primary caregiver of their child immediately following birth. Fifteen fathers were interviewed between 8 days and 6 weeks after the birth of their child. Three categories, five subcategories, and 12 qualitatively different conceptions emerged from the study's findings. The first category showed that parental education emphasizes the importance of normal birth. The second category illustrated that parental education defuses the issue of complicated births. The third category demonstrated that parental education preserves traditional gender roles. The study's results may facilitate efforts to integrate fathers into parental education toward the aim of achieving parity between mother and father in their role as parents.     

Conceptually blindfolded in the optics laboratory. Dilemmas of inductive learning

In modern schooling, student activity and group work are emphasized as important vehicles for learning. Following the perspectives formulated by Piaget and other constructivist thinkers, self-discovery by students of scientific principles is seen as a means for avoiding the pitfalls ascribed to teacher centered lecturing. Teacher explanation in this pedagogical philosophy is often seen as counterproductive to real learning. In the study reported, it is illustrated by means of an example from student group work in a physics laboratory how the understanding of basic principles of optics do not follow from mere observation and physical manipulation of a particular type of educational instrument; the optical bench. It is argued that the optical bench itself is a product of a specific theory of optics and that it embodies principles of understanding the word which are discursive in nature and which are not accessible to learners unless they are provided guidance. In the instance analyzed, students already in some sense had an understanding of the principles illustrated (e.g., that light can only go straight forward, that it cannot go through solid objects, etc.), but they failed to realize the significance of these observations, since they fere not familiar with a theoretical position in which these observations called for an explanation. ‘Seeing’, also in the case of the optics laboratory, relies on the use of cultural tools that provide the observer with relevant contextualizations.     

Validating the proposed structure of the relationships among test anxiety and its predictors based on control-value theory: evidence for gender-specific patterns

Control-value theory (CVT) proposes a framework for the structure of the relationships between the various predictors of achievement-related emotions, particularly anxiety. Despite existing evidence for the role of anxiety predictors, research has not yet justified their proposed structure. Hence, the current study validated the structure of test anxiety (TA) predictors as proposed by CVT. A sample of German adolescent students (N = 845) completed questionnaires that measured their school-related self-efficacy, test-related cognitions (expected grades and their perceived relevance) and the two major facets of TA: worry and emotionality. Multi-group structural equation modelling was used to test for gender differences in the interplay of the variables. Findings supported the assumptions of CVT for girls and boys, in that the proposed structure of relationships among the various predictors of TA was largely equivalent for both genders. However, emotionality was not related to subjective relevance for boys. Implications for further research on predictors of anxiety and its application to the school context are discussed.