Null and Void? Errors in Meta-analysis on Perceptual Disfluency and Recommendations to Improve Meta-analytical Reproducibility

Educational Psychology Review - In the 2018 meta-analysis of Educational Psychology Review entitled “Null effects of perceptual disfluency on learning outcomes in a text-based educational...     

中德学生数学建模能力水平的比较分析——以中国上海和德国巴登符腾堡州学生为例

近期参照的数学建模能力水平分析框架,对中国上海以及德国巴州的一千余名9～11年级学生进行实验研究.结果表明,中德学生的数学建模能力的平均水平非常接近,但是从各个不同的能力水平看,两国学生的成绩存在着一定的差异;另外发现学生的数学建模能力随着年级的升高也不断发展.透过结果发现,中学生数学建模能力薄弱,上海学生的基本技能有滑坡倾向;另外需把握开展数学建模教学的最佳时机.     

Beyond Graduation: Socio-economic Background and Post-university Outcomes of Australian Graduates

Research in Higher Education - Research consistently shows that higher-education participation has positive impacts on individual outcomes. However, few studies explicitly consider differences in...     

The use of public learning diaries in blended learning

Learning diaries—as we employ them—are students’ written reflections of their learning experiences and outcomes over the course of university seminars. The writing of such diaries is ‘tutored’ by a computer program: eHELp supports the writing of sophisticated learning diaries through a modelling and scaffolding of the phases of planning, production and revision. In addition, the learning diaries get published—by uploading them in a cooperation platform—so that the learners can read and discuss their peers’ diaries. The main function of such public learning diaries is to enrich traditional university courses (Blended Learning) with additional elaborative, organisational, critical reasoning, and metacognitive activities in order to foster a deeper processing and better retention of the contents to be learnt. We would like to present the educational rationale of our approach and report the findings of corresponding empirical studies.     

Evaluating item response theory linking and model fit for data from PISA 2000–2012

ABSTRACT

Based on concerns about the item response theory (IRT) linking approach used in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) until 2012 as well as the desire to include new, more complex, interactive items with the introduction of computer-based assessments, alternative IRT linking methods were implemented in the 2015 PISA round. The new linking method represents a concurrent calibration using all available data, enabling us to find item parameters that maximize fit across all groups and allowing us to investigate measurement invariance across groups. Apart from the Rasch model that historically has been used in PISA operational analyses, we compared our method against more general IRT models that can incorporate item-by-country interactions. The results suggest that our proposed method holds promise not only to provide a strong linkage across countries and cycles but also to serve as a tool for investigating measurement invariance.     

Improving the judgment of task difficulties: prospective teachers’ diagnostic competence in the area of functions and graphs

To teach adaptively, teachers should be able to take the students’ level of knowledge into account. Therefore, a key component of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is the ability to assume the students’ perspectives. However, due to the so-called expert blind spot, teachers tend to misestimate their students’ knowledge, such as when estimating the difficulty of a given task. This empirically well-documented estimation bias is predicted by Nickerson’s anchoring and adjustment model, which generally explains how people take on other people’s perspectives. In this article, we present an intervention study that aims to improve the accuracy of prospective teachers’ judgments of task difficulty in the area of functional thinking. Two types of treatments are derived from Nickerson’s model. In the first condition (PCK group), participants acquire knowledge about task characteristics and students’ misconceptions. The second condition (sensitizing group) serves to control the idea that potential improvements in the PCK group are not merely based on a pure sensitization of the expert’s estimation bias. Accordingly, these participants are only informed about the general tendency of overestimating task difficulties. The results showed that the PCK group improved both in terms of the accuracy of the estimated solution rates and the accuracy of rank order, whereas the sensitizing group only improved in regard to the former. Thus, the study shows that prospective teachers’ diagnostic judgments can be improved by teaching them relevant PCK in a short amount of time.     

The risk of delayed school entry in relation to migration background in different institutional settings

In Germany, children of immigrants are faced with delayed school entry about twice as often as children of native-born parents because they are more often diagnosed not being ready for school. We investigate these early educational inequalities, focusing on the interplay of individual competencies and the institutional context in terms of the school enrollment procedure. We compare the conventional procedure, where school enrollment is supposed to be bound on school readiness, with reformed procedures where school enrollment is not supposed to be bound on school readiness. Data of school entry examinations from Hesse, Germany from 2008–2012 are analyzed (N = 50,717). The results show that children of immigrants from all origin groups have a substantially higher risk of obtaining a recommendation for delayed school entry than children of native-born parents. However, these ethnic differences are strongly reduced in the reformed procedures as compared to the conventional school enrollment procedure, indicating that these procedures could be an effective measure to reduce ethnic educational inequalities at school start.     

Intervention program to keep girls in the science pipeline: Outcome differences by ethnic status

This study evaluated a 2‐week residential program aimed at enhancing the science interest and persistence of high‐achieving 8th‐grade girls. Questionnaires were administered to 38 program participants (14 of whom were of minority ethnicity) and 173 applicants who did not attend the program, at 3 time points: preprogram, 1 year postprogram, and 4 years postprogram. Outcomes, measured postprogram, included science self‐concept and interest, persistence and aspirations in science, science activities, science course‐taking in high school, and plans for a science college major. There was no main effect of program participation on any of the outcome measures, but a significant Participation × Ethnicity interaction effect occurred for all but one of the outcome variables. At Time 2, and especially Time 3, nonminority participants tended to have the most positive outcomes, whereas minority participants tended to have the most negative outcomes, compared with applicants. Post hoc analyses showed that although nonminority girls overall were more advantaged, this difference did not explain results. Several interpretations for these findings are discussed, the most likely that some global feature of the program, not any intervention component, interacted over time with the girls' postprogram experience. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 40: 393–414, 2003     

中学生数学建模能力水平的实验分析

1关于数学建模能力21世纪初启动的各国数学课程改革都将学生数学建模思想的形成以及数学建模能力的培养作为数学教育的重要目标之一.例如颁布于2003年底的德国数学教育标准明确提出,数学建模能力是学生应该发展的六大数学能力之一,也就是说学生要学会用数学方法去理解现实相关的情景,提出解决方案,并认清和判断现实中的数学问题.③我国《普通高中数学课程标准实验》也明确提出,数学课程要求把数学探究、数学建模的思想以不同的形式渗透在各模块和专题内容之中.“标准”强调数学建模是运用数学思想、方法和知识解决实际问题的过程.数学建模是…