THE DEPICTION OF SEX ROLES IN AMERICAN AND GERMAN MAGAZINE ADVERTISEMENTS*

This study provides a quantitative content analysis of the depictionsof sex roles in the American news magazine Time and the WestGerman news magazine Stern from 1969 to 1988. The underlyingassumption of the study is that advertisements reflect changesin social reality. While most studies focus on explicit aspectsof gender role depictions such as jobs, activities, interactionsand situations, this content analysis also covers implicit aspectsof role depictions such as posture, gestures, and facial expression.Some authors have claimed that these are powerful means of transmittingtraditional sex role stereotypes of women as being submissiveand of men as being dominant. Results indicate that while therehave been considerable changes in the explicit presentationof male and female roles, the implicit presentation remainedquite consistent over the 20-year period. According to thesefindings, sex roles may have changed primarily on the surface,while nonverbal sex role stereotypes still linger on. Differencesbetween the developments in Germany and the US are outlined.     

Introduction to the Special Issue on INEX

This special issue contains articles describing XML retrieval approaches developed and evaluated during the second year of INEX, the evaluation initiative for XML retrieval.     

The Knowledge Required for Tutorial Planning: An Empirical Analysis

A significant portion of tutorial interactions revolve around the bugs a student makes. When a tutor performs an intervention to help a student fix a programming bug, the problem of deciding how to help the student appears to require extensive planning. In this article, we identify five considerations tutors appear to take into account when they plan tutorial interventions for students’ bugs. Using data collected from human tutors working in the domain of introductory computer programming, we (1) identify the knowledge tutors use when they reason about the five planning considerations, and (2) show that tutors are consistent in the ways that they use the kinds of knowledge to reason about students’ bugs.     

Supporting Programming and Learning-to-Program with an Integrated CAD and Scaffolding Workbench*

Programming is a complex cognitive task for students, because of the difficulty of finding the appropriate elements (the “decomposition” problem) and integrating them correctly into a whole (the “composition” problem). Programming is also hard to learn, because so much of the thinking behind a program is implicit and the process of programming is long and complicated. Our approach is to integrate a computer-aided design tool (CAD) with scaffolding to create a single, cohesive, and coherent workbench for the entire process. Our workbench is called the GPCeditor. We have evaluated its use by high-school students. Our results suggest that students program well in the GPCeditor, they learn good programming practices, and that the learning is occurring through use of the GPCeditor.     

A secretary in the classroom

The following article utilizes methods of educational connoisseurship and educational criticism to describe, interpret, appraise, and thematize the videotape of U.S. Secretary of Education, William Bennett teaching Federalist Paper No. 10 to a group of high school students. The aim of this approach to the study of classroom practice is to give the reader a vivid picture of what has transpired, to try to account for what has been described, to appraise the educational significance of what has occurred, and to extract from the particular situation general themes having import for other educational situations. The following article is a vignette, a short sketch. It was written from a videotape, not a “real” classroom. Nevertheless, it attempts to portray the qualities, significance, and educational meaning of the lesson.     

The role of personal best (PB) and dichotomous achievement goals in students’ academic motivation and engagement: a longitudinal investigation

This study assessed the role of prior personal best goals in predicting subsequent academic motivation and engagement. A total of 1160 high school students participated in a longitudinal survey study exploring the extent to which personal best and mastery and performance (dichotomous) achievement goals predict students’ academic motivation and engagement across the course of a full academic year. Findings showed that personal best goals predicted higher motivation and engagement a year later. Along with personal best goals, mastery goals also predicted higher motivation and engagement, while the role of performance goals was either neutral or negative. These findings provide support for the contention that personal best goals are associated with higher motivation and engagement across time.     

God's Word, Religious Rules, and Their Relation to Christian and Jewish Children's Concepts of Morality

2 studies were conducted of children's concepts of moral and nonmoral religious rules. In Study 1, 64 Amish-Mennonite children (ages 10, 12, 14, 16) were asked to evaluate 4 moral and 7 nonmoral religious rules as to rule alterability, generalizability, and whether the status of the acts was contingent on the word of God. As a second aspect of Study 1, 64 Dutch Reform Calvinist children were asked to determine whether God's commands could make a harmful act morally right. Study 2 replicated the basic design of Study 1 with 64 Conservative and 32 Orthodox Jewish children. Findings were that subjects differentiated between moral and nonmoral religious issues. Moral rules and some nonmoral rules were seen as nonalterable by religious authorities. The status of moral (but not nonmoral) acts was generalized to members outside the religion and was not viewed as contingent on the existence of statements from God. Judgments regarding moral issues were justified in terms of justice and human welfare considerations; nonmoral issues were evaluated in terms of their normative status. Some denominational and age effects were found. Findings supported the proposition that social knowledge is constructed within conceptual systems that represent fundamental categories of social experience.