The filament forming reactions of vimentin tetramers studied in a serial-inlet microflow device by small angle x-ray scattering

The structural organization of metazoan cells and their shape are established through the coordinated interaction of a composite network consisting of three individual filament systems, collectively termed the cytoskeleton. Specifically, microtubules and actin filaments, which assemble from monomeric globular proteins, provide polar structures that serve motor proteins as tracks. In contrast, intermediate filaments (IFs) assemble from highly charged, extended coiled coils in a hierarchical assembly mechanism of lateral and longitudinal interaction steps into non-polar structures. IF proteins are expressed in a distinctly tissue-specific way and thereby serve to generate the precise plasticity of the respective cells and tissues. Accordingly, in the cell, numerous parameters such as pH and salt concentration are adjusted such that the generation of functional networks is ensured. Here, we transfer the problem for the mesenchymal IF protein vimentin to an in vitro setting and combine small angle x-ray scattering with microfluidics and finite element method simulations. Our approach is adapted to resolve the early assembly steps, which take place in the sub-second to second range. In particular, we reveal the influence of ion species and concentrations on the assembly. By tuning the flow rates and thus concentration profiles, we find a minimal critical salt concentration for the initiation of the assembly. Furthermore, our analysis of the surface sensitive Porod regime in the x-ray data reveals that the formation of first assembly intermediates, so-called unit length filaments, is not a one-step reaction but consists of distinct consecutive lateral association steps followed by radial compaction as well as smoothening of the surface of the full-width filament.     

Observing justice in the primary school classroom

Justice-related situations are a part of students? everyday life. In order to test the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of (in)justice in school, valid measures of justice are needed. To our knowledge, this is the first study to develop an observer low inference rating instrument that can be applied to measure justice in the primary classroom. In two pre-studies, justice-relevant situations in the classroom were extracted and observable indicators for these situations were developed. In the main study, this instrument was used to observe 208 primary school students with regard to their experiences of justice or injustice. In addition to this, other measures of justice were developed to examine the convergence between observer low inference ratings of classroom justice and high inference rating instruments for teachers, students, and external observers.Factor analyses and correlations between the different indices of the observer low inference rating and the high inference rating items suggested that incidents of justice and injustice in the classroom do not tend to co-occur frequently. Teachers do not appear to have a general tendency to treat a child more or less justly across a large number of situations.The findings suggest that a comprehensive assessment of classroom justice requires a multi-method approach where the justice ratings of students, teachers and external observers are all taken into consideration.     

Personal Epistemology Research: Implications for Learning and Teaching

The ideas that individuals hold about knowledge and knowing have been the target of research programs with disparate names, such as epistemological beliefs, reflective judgment, ways of knowing, and epistemological reflection, all of which appear to be a part of a larger body of work on “personal epistemology.” Epistemological perspectives are salient in numerous academic experiences, have been shown to be related to learning in various ways, influence reasoning and judgment throughout our lives, and have implications for teaching. Yet this work has remained outside the mainstream of educational psychology and cognitive development. This paper addresses three main questions: (1) What is personal epistemology research and how is it conceptualized? (2) How are individuals' conceptions of epistemology related to learning and instruction? (3) Given what we know about personal epistemology, what might educators do? Suggestions are also provided for future research and theoretical development.     

THE DETERMINATION AND EVALUATION OF RESULTS IN THE STUDY PROCESS

Student assessment and grading schemes in higher education institutions should be adapted and applied in such a way that they stimulate students to achieve to the utmost of their abilities. It is not sufficient to simply give a grade to a student for a task accomplished or even to give him an average grade for a series of tasks accomplished during a given time period, a semester, for instance. Rather it is necessary to create an action framework of a kind which links the performance dynamic of both students and teachers so as to ensure the accurate determination, evaluation, and analysis of the joint student‐teacher performance behaviour in such a way that the individual procedures subject to evaluation can be grouped into joint procedures which stimulate self‐determination self‐evaluation, and self‐analysis on the part of students, teachers, and eventually, the employers of graduates. The authors have designed two models which illustrate optimum evaluation procedures of the kind which they favour.     

Rechtliche Rahmenbedingungen für die Gestaltung universit?rer Curricula

Die bereits im Zuge der Autonomie-St?rkung der Universit?ten durch das UOG 1993 im Rahmen der Erlassung des UniStG 1997 vorgenommene Aufwertung der Selbstregelungskompetenzen der Universit?ten bei der Gestaltung des Studienrechts, findet in der Fassung der studienrechtlichen Vorgaben des UnivG 2002 seine konsequente Fortsetzung. Diese Ausweitung der Selbstregelungskompetenzen geht im rechtsstaatlichen Sinne typischerweise (als Gegengewicht) mit besonderen Anforderungen an Rechtsschutz und Rechtssicherheit einher. Insofern hat der universit?re Verordnungsgeber auch auf die in den Gesetzesgrundlagen zum Ausdruck kommenden Wertungen und Grunds?tze eingehend Bedacht zu nehmen.     

Probleme von Lehrerinnen und Lehrern mit der Beurteilung von Schülerleistungen

Zusammenfassung Die Erzeugung, Begründung und Durchsetzung von Leistungsbeurteilungen in der Schule stellt für Lehrkr?fte in verschiedenen Hinsichten ein Problem dar. Einerseits sind die Grenzen des Konzepts der Schulleistung strittig, andererseits gilt es, ungeachtet der defizit?ren wissenschaftlichen Rationalisierung der Praxis der schulischen Leistungsbeurteilung vertretbare Selektionsentscheidungen zu produzieren sowie zwischen den vielfach als widersprüchlich empfundenen Zielsetzungen der F?rderung und der Selektion abzuw?gen. Der Beitrag geht der Frage nach, wie Lehrkr?fte an ?ffentlichen Schulen mit diesen und ?hnlichen Problemen umgehen. Er berichtet über Teilergebnisse eines von der DFG gef?rderten Forschungsprojekts über „Selektionsentscheidungen als Problembereich professionellen Lehrerhandelns“ (Terhart/Langkau/Lüders 1999). Insbesondere werden Befunde einer Dilemma-Studie vorgestellt, in deren Rahmen Lehrkr?fte mit problematischen Zensierungs-und Selektionsentscheidungen konfrontiert und um eine Stellungnahme gebeten worden sind. Dabei stehen keineswegs erneut die vielfach konstatierten Schw?chen des Lehrerurteils im Zentrum der Betrachtung. Ziel des Beitrages ist es vielmehr, die erhobenen Stellungnahmen der Lehrkr?fte als Ausdruck bestimmter Rahmenbedingungen schulischen Bewertungshandelns zu interpretieren, damit einen vertieften Einblick in die Praxis der Leistungsbeurteilung als Praxis einer in Organisationen t?tigen Profession zu geben und Hypothesen für die weitere Forschung zu generieren.

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Summary Problems Concerning the Judgement of Pupils’ Performance The generation, justification and assertion of judgements concerning pupils’ performance present teachers with a variety of problems. On the one hand, the boundaries of the concept of pupil performance are controversial whilst, on the other, in spite of the deficiency of scientific rationalization of this practice, adequate selective decisions must be generated and the balance between support and selection must be weighed up. This paper considers the way teachers in public schools cope with these and other similar problems. It reports on some of the results from a DFG-supported research project entitled “Selective decisions as a problem area in professional teaching practice” (Terhart/Langkau/Lüders 1999). In particular, responses from a dilemma study are presented, in which teachers were confronted with problematic selective decisions and asked for their professional opinion. The focal point of this study is not the regularly proclaimed weakness of teachers’ judgements. The objective of this paper is instead to interpret the professional judgement of teachers as an expression of particular conditions of school assessment practice; through this, to offer a deeper insight into the practice of performance assessment conceived of as the practice of a profession which works in organizations, and to generate hypotheses for further research in this field of study.

     

Understanding mother-adolescent conflict discussions: concurrent and across-time prediction from youths' dispositions and parenting

Adolescence is often thought of as a period during which the quality of parent-child interactions can be relatively stressed and conflictual. There are individual differences in this regard, however, with only a modest percent of youths experiencing extremely conflictual relationships with their parents. Nonetheless, there is relatively little empirical research on factors in childhood or adolescence that predict individual differences in the quality of parent-adolescent interactions when dealing with potentially conflictual issues. Understanding such individual differences is critical because the quality of both parenting and the parent-adolescent relationship is predictive of a range of developmental outcomes for adolescents. The goals of the research were to examine dispositional and parenting predictors of the quality of parents' and their adolescent children's emotional displays (anger, positive emotion) and verbalizations (negative or positive) when dealing with conflictual issues, and if prediction over time supported continuity versus discontinuity in the factors related to such conflict. We hypothesized that adolescents' and parents' conflict behaviors would be predicted by both childhood and concurrent parenting and child dispositions (and related problem behaviors) and that we would find evidence of both parent- and child-driven pathways. Mothers and adolescents (N5126, M age513 years) participated in a discussion of conflictual issues. A multimethod, multireporter (mother, teacher, and sometimes adolescent reports) longitudinal approach (over 4 years) was used to assess adolescents' dispositional characteristics (control/ regulation, resiliency, and negative emotionality), youths' externalizing problems, and parenting variables (warmth, positive expressivity, discussion of emotion, positive and negative family expressivity). Higher quality conflict reactions (i.e., less negative and/or more positive) were related to both concurrent and antecedent measures of children's dispositional characteristics and externalizing problems, with findings for control/regulation and negative emotionality being much more consistent for daughters than sons. Higher quality conflict reactions were also related to higher quality parenting in the past, positive rather than negative parent-child interactions during a contemporaneous nonconflictual task, and reported intensity of conflict in the past month. In growth curves, conflict quality was primarily predicted by the intercept (i.e., initial levels) of dispositional measures and parenting, although maintenance or less decrement in positive parenting, greater decline in child externalizing problems, and a greater increase in control/regulation over time predicted more desirable conflict reactions. In structural equation models in which an aspect of parenting and a child dispositional variable were used to predict conflict reactions, there was continuity of both type of predictors, parenting was a unique predictor of mothers' (but not adolescents') conflict reactions (and sometimes mediated the relations of child dispositions to conflict reactions), and child dispositions uniquely predicted adolescents' reactions and sometimes mothers' conflict reactions. The findings suggest that parent-adolescent conflict may be influenced by both child characteristics and quality of prior and concurrent parenting, and that in this pattern of relations, child effects are more evident than parent effects.     

How Movies Can Ease the Fear of Death: The Survival or Death of the Protagonists in Meaningful Movies

Many media entertainment products address the fragility of life by portraying the severe illness or death of the protagonist. According to terror management theory, people need to create meaning in their lives when they are reminded of their own mortality, for instance, by engaging in close relationships with others. Meaningful films may provide recipients with an anxiety buffer that helps them to cope with existential fear. The results of an experimental study (N = 130) demonstrated that participants who had been reminded of their mortality appreciated a meaningful movie more and liked the protagonist better when he survived than when he died. Further, participants who viewed the movie in which the protagonist survived did not activate their self-esteem-based anxiety buffer. The results point toward the potential of entertainment to provide internal anxiety buffers and thereby help in coping with self-threatening situations. The findings are discussed in terms of the connections between meaningful media entertainment, coping mechanisms, and viewers’ terror management.     

Revitalizing Ernst Mach’s Popular Scientific Lectures

Compared to Ernst Mach’s influence on the conceptual development of physics, his efforts to popularize science and his reflections on science literacy are known to a much lesser degree. The approach and the impact of Mach’s popular scientific lectures are discussed in view of today’s problems of understanding science. The key issues of Mach’s popular scientific lectures, reconsidered in the light of contemporary science, still hold a high potential in fascinating a general audience. Moreover, Mach’s grand theme, the relation of the physical to the psychical, is suited to contribute to a dialogue between different knowledge cultures, e.g. science and humanities.