Specific predictors of length and frequency effects in German beginning readers: testing component processes of sublexical and lexical reading in the DRC

Reading and Writing - Reading a word requires several component processes. The dual route cascaded (DRC) model provides a characterization of these component processes and their involvement in...     

Improving Group Work Practices in Teaching Life Sciences: Trialogical Learning

Research in Science Education - Trialogical learning, a collaborative and iterative knowledge creation process using real-life artefacts or problems, familiarizes students with working life...     

Quality assessment in diverse disciplinary settings

Basic work in universities is carried out in departments representing diverse disciplinary communities. While tasks, goals, perspectives, and social values may vary considerably between different disciplines, it is difficult to find research texts dealing with the question whether, and how, such differences should be taken into account in quality management. The paper is based on a recent study on quality management in diverse disciplinary settings, in which thirty-three interviews have been carried out in Finland and in the UK, and on the author's previous studies on the disciplines under study. The paper provides some preliminary interpretations of the effects of basic disciplinary features on the suitability of approaches of quality assessment in four diverse disciplines (physics, biology, sociology and history).     

Laudatio auf den Ernst-Christian-Trapp-Preistr?ger 2006 Theodor Schulze

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Questions,Instructions, and Modes of Listening in the Joint Production of Guided Action: A Study of Student–Teacher Collaboration in Handicraft Education

This article concerns a central issue in education as an institutional activity: instructions and their role in guiding student activities and understanding. In the study, we investigate the tensions between specifics and generalities in the joint production of guided action. This issue is explored in the context of handicraft education—or more specifically, a teacher education program in sloyd. Handicraft is particularly interesting when analysing instructions, since the purposes of instructions are often dual: (1) to bring about a broad, instructionally relevant mode of understanding artefacts (including their origin, aesthetics, etc.), and (2) to guide manual action in the production of such artefacts. In the article, a detailed analysis of an instructional sequence, which includes the production of two distinct types of embroideries, is reported. The analysis sheds light on the role of educational examples in sloyd as well as on the related issue concerning the distinctive difference between the activities of listening to instructions as part of a lecture, on the one hand, and, on the other, listening to instructions in order to be able to accomplish a task.     

Not Read,but Nevertheless Solved? Three Experiments on PIRLS Multiple Choice Reading Comprehension Test Items

Multiple-choice (MC) reading comprehension test items comprise three components: text passage, questions about the text, and MC answers. The construct validity of this format has been repeatedly criticized. In three between-subjects experiments, fourth graders (N ₁ = 230, N ₂ = 340, N ₃ = 194) worked on three versions of MC items from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study 2001 reading comprehension test with relevant components successively deleted: “original version” (text, questions, MC-answers), “version without text” (questions, MC-answers), “version without text and without questions” (only MC-answers). Answering correctly the MC items became more difficult as the relevant information was eliminated. In the two narrative fictional texts presented, the students' performance of the version without text was not better than chance. Conversely in the informational (fictional) text, the students' performance of the version without text was better than chance. In the third condition, students' performance was never better than chance.     

The Co-Effects of Query Structure and Expansion on Retrieval Performance in Probabilistic Text Retrieval

The effects of query structures and query expansion (QE) on retrieval performance were tested with a best match retrieval system (InQuery¹). Query structure means the use of operators to express the relations between search keys. Six different structures were tested, representing strong structures (e.g., queries with facets or concepts identified) and weak structures (no concepts identified, a query is a bag of search keys). QE was based on concepts, which were first selected from a searching thesaurus, and then expanded by semantic relationships given in the thesaurus. The expansion levels were (a) no expansion, (b) a synonym expansion, (c) a narrower concept expansion, (d) an associative concept expansion, and (e) a cumulative expansion of all other expansions. With weak structures and Boolean structured queries, QE was not very effective. The best performance was achieved with a combination of a facet structure, where search keys within a facet were treated as instances of one search key (the SYN operator), and the largest expansion.