Wie können Ergebnisse der Kompetenzdiagnostik in Forschungsprojekten sinnvoll zurückgemeldet werden?

Reporting on research results to students, teachers and institutions is a big challenge within competence assessment research: students individually have to be given feedback about how they performed, teachers have to be provided with information about their classes, education authorities are interested in actual research results. For feedback being helpful for students, teachers and institutions, the following questions have to be thought of: (1) Who is the feedback given to? What is the aim of the feedback? (2) Which results shall be reported? (3) How should feedback theoretically look like? And (4) how does feedback depend on the given general framework? The given article discusses these questions and offers a “checklist” to research projects with a focus on competence assessment.     

Skizze zur Historiographie der Ästhetischen Bildung

This article is focussing on a historical approach to the term of aesthetic education from three different angles: as history of ideas, biographies and images. Aesthetic education is thereby understood as performative and reflective involvement with aesthetics and the fine arts such as arts, theatre and literature etc. A first approach is defining the history of ideas as a theoretical reconstruction of aesthetic concepts and their educational relevance; this history is also discussing educational theories and their aesthetic implications. It is more or less an implicit and compensatory history because the important contexts are not visible at first sight; and the aesthetic and pedagogical theories often need a reciprocal addition. A biographical perspective is hereby concentrated on the biography of artists. Thereby the educational science of biographies are highlighting the situation of the arts and the artists, the development of becoming an artist, the progression as an artist and the artistic institutions in a educational-aesthetic nexus. Such a perspective is supplementing the history of ideas concerning cultural and socio-historical dimensions as well as institutional and biographic aspects. Finally, the history of images is focusing on the thesis that every picture also includes a programme of aesthetic education. In pictures the process of productive and reflective visualisation is expressed: paintings refer to their production and their understanding. For the method of the historical-educational iconography of aesthetic education a historicizing matrix from production aesthetics, work aesthetics and reception aesthetics is suggested. This matrix is combined with a theory of education as transformation of self-relation, of relations to other individuals and the world. The three approaches just mentioned are exemplified by Leonardo da Vinci and his famous picture “Vitruvian Man” from 1492.     

Was grenzt das Kompetenzkonzept von etablierten Kategorien wie Fähigkeit,Fertigkeit oder Intelligenz ab?

Following a specification of the concept “competence” as it is applied in the context of the priority program we place recent efforts on competence assessment within established distinctions. Besides Cronbach’s differentiation of typical behavior and maximal effort and Cattell’s demarcation of test and questionnaire data additional discriminations against broader terms such as “ability”, “skill”, “talent” but also “intelligence” are desirable and necessary. The utility of the concept of competence relative to established terms needs to be demonstrated unequivocally in the future.     

Identifying Factors that Influence the Successful Transition of Criminal Justice Transfer Students

Higher educational institutions place a priority on the retention and timely graduation of students. Previous literature has identified transfer students to have unique concerns and that these concerns vary by major. While previous retention research has reported factors that influence students’ decision to remain in college, many of these studies treated transfer status as a homogenous group. The university in this study enrolls a high percentage of transfer students, and a large percentage of these transfers students enroll in Criminal Justice classes and become Criminal Justice majors. To determine if there are unique risk factors among Criminal Justice transfer students, this study uses multiple measures of transfer status to identify factors that might impact a students’ (1) university involvement, (2) GPA, (3) satisfaction with and sense of belonging to their university and (4) thereby influence their decision to remain in school. The proposition that transfer students as compared to native (nontransfer) students differ on how they face university challenges was also examined. While several variables were found to be important to students’ adjustment to the University, transfer status does not appear to be significant risk factor. Implications of the results are discussed.     

Profiles in Change: An Alternative Look at the Marshall Hypotheses∗

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall once argued that informed opinion would oppose the death penalty for all but those who support it for retributive reasons. We examine the validity of these claims with data from a series of one‐group pre‐test–post‐test designs which stem from a formalized learning outcomes assessment for several courses on the death penalty. Results show solid, but imperfect, support for these claims. The analysis then proceeds by profiling those who changed their opinions consistent with these claims, those who did not change their opinions, and those whose opinions changed in a manner opposite to these claims.     

Evaluating the Graduation Gap: Interventions Designed to Enhance Upper-level Student Success and Commitment

Over the past several decades, there has been a wealth of research identifying factors and conditions of persistence toward graduation for first-year students and more recently transfer students. While previous research recognizes these critical periods, some recent literature suggests that students may face a similar transitional period later in their academic careers as they advance into their major areas of study. To date, there has been a dearth of information exploring upper-level students' success and commitment to graduation. Exploring this later transition might provide a critical link to understanding the graduation gap between those students who persist to graduation and those who drop out. The purpose of this research was to review the intervention programs proscribed by the literature, design an intervention program, and examine the impact of the program on criminal justice students during this advanced transitional phase of their college careers. It examined the direct and indirect effects of the intervention program on both retention and the antecedents of successful retention while controlling for other relevant influences identified in the literature. The results indicated that the intervention had small, but significant positive direct and indirect effects on academic integration, commitment to the university, and graduating in a timely fashion. Policy implications are discussed.     

“The Coat Traps All Your Body Heat”: Heterogeneity as Fundamental to Learning

This article explores heterogeneity as fundamental to learning. Inspired by Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia, a design team consisting of an experienced classroom teacher and 2 researchers investigated how a class of 3rd and 4th graders came to understand disciplinary points of view on heat, heat transfer, and the particulate nature of matter. Through a series of planned and unplanned encounters, official versions of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the particulate view of matter were juxtaposed with varied domains of experience of heat transfer and phase change in water. We analyze the children's discourse to examine how they populated these phenomena with meaning and what they learned in the process. We conclude by describing key principles and a conundrum that emerged from this research.     

Practitioners' Perspectives of Collaboration: A Social Validation and Factor Analysis

This investigation was designed to socially validate the characterization and operational definitions of collaboration as described in the professional literature and quantitatively identify salient features of collaboration. The study was conducted in two phases. The first phase employed an adelphi methodology asking practitioners to define and describe the collaborative process. Open-ended surveys were sent to teachers, special education teachers, administrators, and related service providers at the building, district, and state levels in 3 states representing distinct national regions. A content analysis team identified 35 thematic units that were used to create a second instrument for the second phase of the study, a factor analysis. Surveys were sent to teachers, special educators, administrators, and related service providers at the building, district, and state levels in 7 states. A factor analysis revealed 4 factors as salient components of collaboration. Results of the investigation socially validated most concepts of collaboration articulated in the literature. Overall, practitioners have a pragmatic view of the process of collaboration coupled with an emphasis on the collaborative ethic. Each identified factor is described and discussed. This article concludes with implications of these findings for professional preparation programs.     

Context in Methods Course Learning: Lessons for partnership work

Teacher education programs are being encouraged to collaborate with K‐12 partners to develop and implement contextually rich field experiences that integrate methods course instruction with public school practices. As a result, we outline four models of integrating methods instruction and field experiences and raise the question “How does the classroom and school context of the field experience influence what prospective teachers learned in the methods courses?” This study examines the way two different cohorts of prospective elementary teachers who learned to teach in two different contexts define their own social studies pedagogical content knowledge. The students' espoused philosophies of education offer insight into how different models of integrated field experiences may impact on their beliefs about social studies teaching. Through this study we raise questions that should be considered in constructing methods courses linked to field experiences and suggest Bronfenbrenner's model as a tool for looking at these contextual influences.     

Student and Lecturer Responses to the Introduction of Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) in a University Business School

This paper comprehensively reviews the CAL literature before reporting on a study of student and lecturer take-up of the Learning Resource Web (LRW), within the Bristol Business School. The study was multimethod, incorporating a survey of student expectations (n=394) and qualitative interviews with teaching staff (n=12). The LRW initially supported teaching in the sciences. Its implementation in the Business School raised questions about the support it might offer for active and experiential pedagogies. Lecturers tended to use the LRW as an aid to course management, but also saw it as a catalyst for pedagogic change and, in particular, the development of independent learning skills amongst undergraduates. By contrast, students welcomed the system because it appeared to provide a learning safety-net. The study highlights tentative signs that, because of this, the introduction of the LRW may be promoting the instrumentality and dependence on exposition that lecturers often seek to counteract.