Assessing quality characteristics of center-based early childhood environments in Germany and Portugal: A cross-national study

Based on the knowledge that direct assessment of the quality of early childhood educational environments is becoming more and more important, this article deals with a coordinated adaptation of the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS) in Germany and Portugal. The ECERS, developed by Harms and Clifford (1980), is a complex rating scale, comprising 37 items, which is implemented to assess major quality characteristics of early childhood classrooms and has been used quite extensively in the US as well as in other countries. In this article we describe how the scale was adapted and we report selected results of a jointly coordinated comparative study on a sample of 103 early childhood classrooms in Germany and 88 in Portugal. The classrooms were classified according to three different types in each country. In particular, we report the item characteristics of the adapted versions, reliabilities and intercorrelations of the total scale and the apriori-subscales, and results of factor analyses. A one-way ANOVA indicates group differences between the six types of classrooms which can be meaningfully interpreted.     

Formale Methoden für sicherheitskritische Software – Der KIV-Ansatz

Zusammenfassung. Im Spektrum der qualit?tssichernden Ma?nahmen im Software-Entwurf geh?ren formale Spezifikations- und Verifikationsmethoden heute zweifellos zu den st?rksten Waffen in puncto Fehlererkennung und Nachweis von Korrektheitseigenschaften. Mit zunehmender Wirtschaftlichkeit formaler Methoden und in Kombination mit klassischen Techniken der Qualit?tssicherung ergeben sich dadurch neue, weitreichende M?glichkeiten. Die Wirksamkeit formaler Methoden beruht im wesentlichen auf der Mathematisierung von Teilen der Software-Entwicklung und dem damit verbundenen Zwang zur Pr?zision. Auf dieser Basis k?nnen Fehler entdeckt, Korrektheits- und Sicherheitseigenschaften nachgewiesen und die Auswirkungen von System?nderungen formal analysiert werden. Diese Methoden eignen sich besonders für Anwendungen, an die traditionell h?chste Zuverl?ssigkeits- und Qualit?tsanforderungen gestellt werden. Dieser Artikel gibt einen überblicküber verschiedene Einsatzm?glichkeiten formaler Spezifikations- und Verifikationsmethoden und stellt das KIV System vor, ein fortgeschrittenes Werkzeug zur Anwendung formaler Methoden. Am Beispiel von KIV wird der aktuelle Leistungsstand und die Wirtschaftlichkeit der Technologie erl?utert. Eingegangen am 2. Februar 1999 / Angenommen am 10. Juli 1999     

An exploration of the relationship between symbolic representation in dramatic play and art and the cognitive and reading readiness levels of kindergarten children

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between symbolic representation in dramatic play and art and the cognitive and reading readiness levels of kindergarten children. Specifically, the study attempted to determine if there is a significant difference in the performance of kindergarten children on the conservation of number tasks (reflective of the level of operational thought and cognitive development), the Metropolitan Reading Readiness Test, and their involvement and/or level of symbolic re resentation in dramatic play and/or art. Results indicated that children at diffrent cognitive levels (a) performed significantly differently on the Metropolitan Reading Readiness Test, (b) spent significantly different amounts of time involved in dramatic play, and (c) expressed significantly different levels of symbolic representations in dramatic play. No differences were found to exist, however, in their symbolic representation in art.     

Weltoffenes Pädagogisches Denken

Ohne ZusammenfassungZum 80. Geburtstag Friedrich Schneiders     

Architektur Multimedialer Informationssysteme

Ohne Zusammenfassung

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Architektur Multimedialer Informationssysteme

     

Expertise, Aptitude, and Strategic Remembering

Second- and fourth-grade children were classified according to their knowledge of soccer (experts vs. novices) and IQ (high vs. low), and given 2 sort-recall tasks. One task included items related to the game of soccer and the other included items from familiar natural language categories. Previous research has shown that expertise in a subject can compensate for low levels of performance on text comprehension tasks. Our results, the first examining the effects of both expertise and intelligence on a strategic memory task, were that soccer expert children recalled more items on the soccer list but not on the nonsoccer list than soccer novice children. However, soccer expertise did not modify a significant effect of IQ level, with high-IQ children recalling more than low-IQ children for all contrasts. Interest in soccer was found to be related to expertise but did not contribute to differences in memory performance. The results demonstrate that the knowledge base plays an important role in children's memory, but that domain knowledge cannot fully eliminate the effects of IQ on sort-recall tasks using domain-related materials. That is, although rich domain knowledge seemed to compensate for low aptitude, in that low-aptitude experts performed at the level of high-aptitude novices, its effects were not strong enough to eliminate performance differences between high- and low-aptitude soccer experts.