The impact of participation in sports on educational attainment—New evidence from Germany

We analyze the impact of exercising sports during childhood and adolescence on educational attainment. The theoretical framework is based on models of allocation of time and educational productivity. Using the rich information from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), we apply generalized ordered probit models to estimate the effect of participation in sport activities on secondary school degrees and professional degrees. Even after controlling for important variables and selection into sport, we find strong evidence that the effect of sport on educational attainment is statistically significant and positive.     

Ohne Schulabschluss in die Berufsausbildung: Ergebnisse einer Längsschnittuntersuchung

Young people who leave school without obtaining a secondary school certificate bear an increased risk of not completing vocational training and being excluded from stable employment in their working life. However, some of these young people do achieve access to vocational training and employment. Based on a longitudinal study of school-to-work transitions of a representative sample of graduates from Praxisklassen in Bavaria (a course especially designed for potential school drop outs at the lower secondary school – Hauptschule), patterns of transition that lead into vocational training and employment are compared with patterns that end up in exclusion from education, training and employment. Determinants of successful transitions, which can be targeted by pedagogical measures, are inter alia: participation in internships in enterprises during the last year of schooling, help and support received from parents and professional career guidance. However, besides these influential factors, regional labor market conditions are important for a successful school-to-work transition. This close link to the labor market ultimately limits the effects of educational interventions.     

(N)Olympia in Germany? An analysis of the referendum against Munich 2022

In November 2013, local citizens of Munich and the surrounding districts voted in a referendum against a city’s bid for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. Since this is but one example of such a failed referendum—others being the ones in Poland, Switzerland and Austria—it is astonishing that it seems to become common practice to conduct public polls regarding the bid for a mega sport event. The city of Hamburg, for instance, will be the next German city to hold a referendum on its bid for the 2024 Olympic Games in November 2015. Against this backdrop, we introduce the ‘Arenatheoretical Model’ into mega event research and conduct a qualitative content analysis of the media coverage on the Munich referendum. Three nationwide German newspapers were analysed as the model suggests that this coverage has a profound influence on the public opinion in other parts of the country. The aim was to identify arguments brought forward to explain the outcome of the referendum. Besides a number of other issues, such as concerns regarding event legacy and regional matters, major findings stress the significance of a damaged brand image of international sport organisations and ‘their’ events. Based on these insights, a number of implications can be derived for other cities/nations and sport organisations that depend on a favourable public opinion in their efforts to stage a mega sport event.     

Task-dependent construction of mental models as a basis for conceptual change

Learning can be seen as a task-oriented process which often requires the reorganization of existing knowledge, usually referred to as conceptual change. This paper describes a theoretical framework for the analysis of conceptual change that considers conceptual knowledge as a generative cognitive tool for the creation of more specific mental representations — propositional symbolic structures and analog mental models. According to this view, conceptual change is based on a task-oriented interaction between these different kinds of mental representations. The assumption is made that it is possible to foster conceptual change by presenting to students well-defined tasks that stimulate the construction of elaborated mental models as well as an intensive interaction between these models and the corresponding propositional representations. In order to test this assumption an empirical study was conducted, in which subjects had to express their prior knowledge about a complex subject matter from the field of geography (time differences on the earth), which contained various conceptual deficits. The subjects were then randomly assigned to different groups who received the same learning material but had to solve different learning tasks requiring differently structured mental models. Afterwards, the subjects were asked to express their knowledge about the subject matter again and were tested for understanding with a comprehension test. The results support the view that a task-oriented interaction between propositional structures and mental models can help learners to evaluate the consistency of their conceptual knowledge. Accordingly, conceptual deficits result in the formation of mental models with an inadequate structure. Such deficits can be detected if the respective model is used in a sufficiently variable way, whereas they can remain unnoticed if it is used in a limited manner.