„Wirtschaftsseminare für Lehrer“ in West-Berlin

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Supporting learning with interactive multimedia through active integration of representations

When learners explore dynamic and interactive visualisations they are often not able to interact with them in a systematic and goal-oriented way. Frequently, even supporting learners in processes of discovery learning does not lead to better learning outcomes. This can be due to missing pre-requisite knowledge such as the coherent mental integration of the pictorial and symbolic sources of information. In order to support learners in this process, we encouraged them to interactively and externally relate different static sources of information to each other before exploring dynamic and interactive visualisations. We evaluated the benefit of this instructional support in two experimental studies concerning the domains of statistics and mechanics. It revealed that the active integration of static representations before processing dynamic visualisations resulted in better performance and can provide a basis for a more systematic and goal-oriented experimentation behaviour during simulation-based discovery learning.in final form: 16 November 2004     

The Problem of School Failure in Sweden

The opening of the article points to the importance of a broad contextualisation of the understanding of school failure, which needs to be understood both on the educational-political level, as well as on the economical, practical and organisational levels. Questions of justice in the Swedish educational system are explored and the validity of this broad focus is examined through a historical discussion of the rhetorical and traditional idea of a school for all. The point of this analysis is critically to point to a gap between this idea and the practical situation in schools. Connected to this analysis, two important reform themes within the Swedish school today are discussed: those of individuality and decentralisation and their implications for school failure. The latter part of the article contains a statistically based analysis of school failure in Sweden. The ambitious political goals of the compulsory school are described and analysed and the problems in attaining this goal are highlighted. The heart of the problem is connected to differences in value systems, determining what is important knowledge within different cultural backgrounds.     

A journal is a club: a new economic model for scholarly publishing

A new economic model for the analysis of scholarly publishing – journal publishing in particular – is proposed that draws on club theory. The standard approach builds on market failure in the private production (by research scholars) of a public good (new scholarly knowledge). In this model, publishing is communication, as the dissemination of information. But a club model views publishing differently: namely as group formation, where members form groups in order to confer externalities on each other, subject to congestion. A journal is a self-constituted group, endeavouring to create new knowledge. In this sense, a journal is a club. The knowledge club model of a journal seeks to balance the positive externalities of a shared resource (readers, citations, referees) against the negative externalities of crowding (decreased prospect of publishing in that journal). A new economic model of a journal as a knowledge club is elaborated. We suggest some consequences for the management of journals and financial models that might be developed to support them.     

Peripheral vision and simple catching: The screen paradigm revisted

The importance of effector visual feedback has previously been indicated using an opaque screen to prevent sight of the catching hand for the final 150–200 ms of a flight path of 850 ms in total. Attention was drawn to the finding that the ability to position the arm correctly in the line of flight of the ball deteriorated as a consequence of the number of trials without visual feedback. However, the use of only 20 test trials allows a possibility that the proprioceptive system may be able to re‐establish predominant control under conditions of prolonged visual decrement. In order to verify this notion, the number of experimental trials was quadrupled for 24 subjects of mixed sex in a replication of the initial paradigm.

The results provided preliminary support for the view that the positioning of the catching arm is more seriously affected by visual occlusion than the timing of the grasp phase. However, increments in accuracy of limb orientation were evidenced in all screen conditions, as the number of trials increased. The grasp component of one‐handed catching appeared to remain unaffected by the increase in experimental trials. The relative influence of skill level on catching errors was next addressed by comparing the performance of the six best and worst catchers in the group.

The results did not support previous research which found a relation between skill level and error type. The number of position, but not grasp, errors decreased as a function of task practice for both subgroups. Future investigations should, perhaps, focus on the developmental nature of movement control in one‐handed catching to obtain a clearer picture of this relation.     

Using LOGO with Infant School Children

Abstract The recent introduction of micro‐computers into schools is opening up many new avenues for developmental psychologists interested in studying how children learn. Of particular interest at present are approaches in which children program computers themselves, using languages such as LOGO and PROLOG. This paper describes a study in which a simplified version of LOGO was introduced to a group of six‐year‐olds in a severely deprived area of Edinburgh. The children used a special touch‐sensitive keyboard (Concept Keyboard) to control the movements of a floor‐crawling robot called a Turtle. The sessions with the Turtle were marked by high levels of concentration, collaborative problem‐solving and the use of mathematical language. Pre‐ and post‐tests on the British Ability Scales revealed statistically significant gains on the sub‐scales concerned with number and shape: these gains, however, were found only in the boys.