Training on the project: a quantifying approach to competence development

In the project ‘Competence-Driven Project Portfolio Analysis’ (CDPPA), an integrated system for supporting R&D project selection, staff assignment and activity scheduling with special consideration of the strategic development of competencies has been designed and implemented prototypically. The system has been field-tested at the Electronic Commerce Competence Center (EC3), a public–private partnership R&D enterprise. Experiences from this trial application are summarised and discussed, particularly concerning data collection and competence measurement, the benefits and limits of the chosen multi-criteria decision analysis approach, the evaluation of introduced changes to the decision-making processes, and the transparency of the formal planning model and its components.     

卡尔斯鲁厄物理课程

卡尔斯鲁厄物理课程试图通过消除传统概念、重新建构内容和广泛运用实物模型来促使物理课程的现代化。该课程在欧洲已被试用了二十多年,并经过了试验和修改;在中国已被试用了近八年。本文将介绍该课程的结构,并讨论在物理学各分支学科中的相关教学问题。     

Entwicklungsförderung im außerschulischen Kinder- und Jugendsport

Extracurricular sport is coupled with many socialization and education potentials for developmental promotion of children and adolescents. The promotion concept “Psychosocial resources in sports” (Sygusch 2007) provides the starting point for the development of capabilities to react and perform in sports as well as for general personality development through sport. This incentive concept is oriented towards training and competitive routine as well as on concrete demands from types of sport. Among others it justifies the methodical measures for promotion of selected resources (e. g. self-concept, cooperative ability). Within the framework of the accompanying study PRimus (psychosocial resources in youth sports) an evaluation of the execution of the programme was realized. Among others it was investigated whether the incentive concept can be implemented in organized child and youth sports. The results indicate that the incentive concept “pedagogically arranged extracurricular youth sports” is implemented by voluntary youth trainers in most instances and is estimated by trainers to be feasible.     

Impact evaluation from quality assurance agencies’ perspectives: methodological approaches,experiences and expectations

Starting from the main objective of external quality assurance (EQA) procedures to assure and improve the quality of higher education institutions and its provisions, the paper examines expected impacts of EQA procedures on institutions from the perspectives of three European quality assurance agencies. First, the paper examines the expected impacts of different standard parts of a typical peer review procedure on higher education institutions and assesses when a procedure is most likely to have an effect on the institution. The second part presents the current practices of the three EQA agencies, AQU Catalunya (Spain), Evaluationsagentur Baden-Württemberg (evalag) (Germany) and the Finnish Education Evaluation Centre (Finland) on assessing the impact of their EQA procedures.     

Attention toward contexts modulates context-specificity of behavior in human predictive learning: Evidence from the <Emphasis Type="Italic">n</Emphasis>-back task

According to the attentional theory of context processing (ATCP), learning becomes context specific when acquired under conditions that promote attention toward contextual stimuli regardless of whether attention deployment is guided by learning experience or by other factors unrelated to learning. In one experiment with humans, we investigated whether performance in a predictive learning task can be brought under contextual control by means of a secondary task that was unrelated to predictive learning, but supposed to modulate participants’ attention toward contexts. Initially, participants acquired cue-outcome relationships presented in contexts that were each composed of two elements from two dimensions. Acquisition training in the predictive learning task was combined with a one-back task that required participants to match across consecutive trials context elements belonging to one of the two dimensions. During a subsequent test, we observed that acquisition behavior in the predictive learning task was disrupted by changing the acquisition context along the dimension that was relevant for the one-back task, while there was no evidence for context specificity of predictive learning when the acquisition context was changed along the dimension that was irrelevant for the one-back task. Our results support the generality of the principles advocated by ATCP.     

Motivation of software developers in Open Source projects: an Internet-based survey of contributors to the Linux kernel

The motives of 141 contributors to a large Open Source Software (OSS) project (the Linux kernel) was explored with an Internet-based questionnaire study. Measured factors were both derived from discussions within the Linux community as well as from models from social sciences. Participants’ engagement was particularly determined by their identification as a Linux developer, by pragmatic motives to improve own software, and by their tolerance of time investments. Moreover, some of the software development was accomplished by teams. Activities in these teams were particularly determined by participants’ evaluation of the team goals as well as by their perceived indispensability and self-efficacy.     

Expression of human acidic fibroblast growth factor in Pichia pastoris

1. Introduction Acidic fibroblast growth factor (aFGF), a member of a family of structurally related polypeptides, is a kind of multifunctional protein that can stimulate cellular proliferation, migration and differentiation. In vivo, aFGF displays angiogenic activity promoting vascular endothelial cell mitogenesis as well as chemotaxis and induction of proteases involved in tissue regeneration [1]. Due to this wide range of biological activities, many potential therapeutic usages of aFGF …     

Good,now keep going: challenging the status quo in STEM pipeline and access programs

Cultural Studies of Science Education - This contribution engages in conversation with McMahon, Griese, and Kenyon (this issue) to consider how the SURE program they describe represents a pragmatic...