Competence Profile School Management (CPSM) – an inventory for the self-assessment of school leadership

The professional demands on school leaders have changed drastically and have become highly complex in the last few years. The professionalization of school leaders is high on the agenda. Human resource management includes different aspects of professionalization. One major domain is the preparation, induction and continuous professional development of individual leaders and leadership teams. Another is personnel marketing and selection, which includes the question of attracting capable future leaders and of appointing the right candidates. However in Europe there is a need for standardised tools which provide systematic feedback to professionals interested in assessing their strengths and individual development needs. Suitable instruments are still scarce. The Competence Profile School Management CPSM (German: KompetenzProfil SchulManagement; KPSM) is the first online-based self-assessment in the German language which has been designed to fit the school context and is based on psychometric principles. It offers participants the possibility to reflect their strengths and weaknesses in different requirement areas of school leadership; and to compare their individual results with peers from the school context, thus gaining valuable information on their individual profiles when planning their professional development and careers. After sketching the theoretical and empirical background, this article presents information about the aims and purpose of CPSM, the tool’s development, its test scales and test formats, the results of the pilot study and those of the evaluation study. Then, the further development of the tool in terms of modifications and add-ons are outlined, before, finally, the tool’s contribution to practice and research is discussed.     

Freelancers and the absorption of external knowledge: practical implications and theoretical contributions

The term absorptive capacity (AC) describes the process of utilising external knowledge. Although firms are becoming increasingly reliant on highly skilled freelancers as a source of external knowledge, the literature on AC has not incorporated this collaboration for freelancers. In this paper, we address this research deficit in two ways: First, we argue that the ability to collaborate effectively and efficiently with freelancers plays a crucial role in the process of absorbing external knowledge. Second, we argue that the example of freelancers challenges researchers to rethink the conceptualisation of organisational boundaries within the concept of AC. Our paper is based upon previous theoretical insights and exploratory empirical data from a research project on German IT freelancers. For the practice of knowledge management, our paper elaborates upon how organisations can enhance their AC by investing in practices and routines that contribute to successful collaboration with freelancers.     

Cognitive and environmental predictors of early literacy skills

Not all young children benefit from book exposure in preschool age. It is claimed that the ability to hold information in mind (short-term memory), to ignore distraction (inhibition), and to focus attention and stay focused (sustained attention) may have a moderating effect on children’s reactions to the home literacy environment. In a group of 228 junior kindergarten children with a native Dutch background, with a mean age of 54.29 months (SD = 2.12 months), we explored therefore the relationship between book exposure, cognitive control and early literacy skills. Parents filled in a HLE questionnaire (book sharing frequency and an author recognition checklist as indicator of parental leisure reading habits), and children completed several tests in individual sessions with the researcher (a book-cover recognition test, PPVT, letter knowledge test, the subtests categories and patterns of the SON, and cognitive control measures namely digit span of the KABC, a peg tapping task and sustained attention of the ANT). Main findings were: (1) Children’s storybook knowledge mediated the relationship between home literacy environment and literacy skills. (2) Both vocabulary and letter knowledge were predicted by book exposure. (3) Short-term memory predicted vocabulary over and above book exposure. (4) None of the cognitive control mechanisms moderated the beneficial effects of book exposure.     

The public understanding of nanotechnology in the food domain: the hidden role of views on science, technology, and nature

In spite of great expectations about the potential of nanotechnology, this study shows that people are rather ambiguous and pessimistic about nanotechnology applications in the food domain. Our findings are drawn from a survey of public perceptions about nanotechnology food and nanotechnology food packaging (N = 752). Multinomial logistic regression analyses further reveal that knowledge about food risks and nanotechnology significantly influences people's views about nanotechnology food packaging. However, knowledge variables were unrelated to support for nanofood, suggesting that an increase in people's knowledge might not be sufficient to bridge the gap between the excitement some business leaders in the food sector have and the restraint of the public. Additionally, opposition to nanofood was not related to the use of heuristics but to trust in governmental agencies. Furthermore, the results indicate that public perceptions of nanoscience in the food domain significantly relate to views on science, technology, and nature.     

A new family of old Hirsch index variants

The Hirsch index h and the g index proposed by Egghe as well as the f index and the t index proposed by Tol are shown to be special cases of a family of Hirsch index variants, based on the generalized mean with exponent p. Inequalities between the different indices are derived from the generalized mean inequality. The graphical determination of the indices is shown for one example.     

A case study of the modified g index: Counting multi-author publications fractionally

The citation records of 26 physicists are analyzed in order to determine the modified g index g_m which takes multiple coauthorship into account by fractionalized counting of the publications. The results are compared with the original g index as well as with the h index and the respective modified h index h_m. Although the correlations between these indices are relatively strong, the arrangement of the datasets is significantly different in detail depending on whether they are put into order according to the values of either the original or the modified indices.     

Metacognitive monitoring in university classes: anticipating a graded vs. a pass-fail test affects monitoring accuracy

Three field studies tested the hypothesis that anticipating a graded test as opposed to a pass-fail test enhances metacognitive monitoring. Participants were teacher candidates who completed a mid-term and a final test in psychology courses. Each participant chose whether the result of the final test should be evaluated with one of five grades or with a pass-fail decision. In both tests, participants answered true–false inference items about the contents of the course and indicated their confidence in the correctness of each answer. When a graded test was expected, confidence and the absolute accuracy of the confidence judgments increased and bias decreased to a greater extent than when a pass-fail decision was expected. However, expecting a grade increased participants’ confidence not only in correct answers but also in incorrect answers (Study 1). Feedback and instructions emphasizing the importance of accurate discrimination between correct and incorrect answers did not weaken this effect (Study 2). The generalizability of the findings was investigated by reanalyzing the test results of participants in eight other psychology courses (Study 3). The results are discussed in terms of the motivational consequences of grading.