überg?nge in die Ausbildung: Welche Rolle spielt die Ausbildungsreife?

Youth with no or only a lower secondary school degree (Hauptschulabschluss) are increasingly disadvantaged in terms of access to vocational education and training (VET). Their lower chances of obtaining a trainee are explained by the claim that an increasing number of them are ??not mature enough for VET??. These young people would not (yet) meet the training requirements??so the criticism. So far there are no empirical studies that have shown whether such immaturity can indeed serve as an appropriate explanation for differences in training chances of less-educated youth. This paper answers this question by analyses using a panel survey of school leavers after grade 9 from the Hauptschule in Lower Saxony. Central results are: About 45?% of the school leavers had successfully entered into an apprenticeship within three months. School grades in German and mathematics were less important than grades for work attitudes and firm-internships while still at school. In general, our analyses reveal that social behaviour and a firm??s opportunities to discover the strengths of low-achieving youths and not only their weaknesses are important factors for the chances of successful transitions into training.     

Professional Competence and Intuitive Decision Making: A Simulation Study in the Domain of Emergency Medicine

Intuition presents as a crucial component of professional competence for many occupations, including emergency physicians because many of their decisions have to be made quickly. When arriving at the scene of an accident, they promptly have to assess the circumstances and initiate immediate life-saving measures without opportunities for deep analyses of patients’ conditions. Therefore, spontaneous and intuitive decisions are required to solve the problem appropriately, rather than more intentional and time-consuming forms of decision-making. Yet, the efficacy of and processes underpinning these intuitive activities remain far from fully understood or clearly conceptualised. The study reported here aims at revealing the efficacy of such intuition by analysing decision-making behaviour of emergency physicians. Based on patient simulation mannequins, which can be programmed to present specified clinical situations, three groups of participants with different levels of emergency medicine expertise (n ₁  = 10 novices, n ₂  = 10 semi-experts, n ₃  = 10 experts) each addressed two different authentic problem cases. In the first simulation, time pressure was utilised to press participants to decide intuitively. In the second simulation, the participants had to legitimise their decisions without any time pressure in order to generate rational decisions. Whereas no clear difference in the participants’ performances between both cases could be identified, experts and semi-experts performed better than novices in their intuitive decision-making, thereby supporting beliefs about the efficacy of intuition. It is proposed that medical education, as well as other forms of occupational preparation, should consider theories of mental simulations in order to improve surgeons’ professional education.     

Online Physics Lab Exercises—a Binational Study on the Transfer of Teaching Resources

In this paper, we present the design and the results of a comparative study that evaluated the success of a transfer of an online-teaching resource between two universities, one in Germany and one in the USA. The teaching resource is an online physics lab that has been used in the physics education of medical students in Germany since 2003. The online lab covers geometrical optics and the optics of the human eye using interactive screen experiments. It was translated and transferred to a university in the USA where it was used and evaluated with a group of pre-health students. In a cross-national study, students’ backgrounds (demographic data, selected cognitive abilities, previous knowledge, and self-concept in physics), students’ attitudes towards the online lab, and their learning gain were compared. The results show significant differences between the German and the US cohorts with regard to students’ backgrounds. Despite these differences, the outcomes are similar, with slightly higher leaning gains for the US students. Students’ attitudes towards the online lab are similar in both countries but tend to be more positive among the US students. The results indicate that the transfer of the online lab to another educational system was successful.     

Educational technology as a key to educational innovation:

Instructional technology, especially the use of computers and the Internet has been lagging behind in the German educational system in comparison to other European countries. When this lack was realized in the second half of the 1990s it had quite a “shock-effect” but one of the healthy kind: Since then numerous public and private initiatives have been started to advance the use of technology in schools, higher education, and in vocational training. At the college and university level, there is a trend towards connecting online and offline courses. Also, it was understood that it is not enough to just provide schools and universities with the technology needed but that the introduction of technology has to be accompanied by profound systemic and structural changes. Thus, there is great hope that the use of technology in education will fuel educational innovations at all levels needed for educating and training pupils and students to act as responsible and media-literate citizens in a modern world.     

Beyond English language proficiency scores: understanding the academic performance of international undergraduate students during the first year of study

ABSTRACT

Past research into the relationship between English proficiency test (EPT) scores and score profiles, such as the IELTS and the TOEFL, has shown that there is not always a clear relationship between those scores and students’ subsequent academic achievement. Information about students’ academic self-concept (ASC) may provide additional information that helps predict future academic success. Research has consistently shown a positive relationship between students’ ASC and subsequent academic achievement and educational attainment in both school and higher education settings. The purpose of the current study was to examine the relationship between the academic performance of international students and their language proficiency and academic self-concept as well as other characteristics related to academic success. The study focused on first year international students in undergraduate business programs at an English-medium university in Canada. The following information was collected about the student participants: grades in degree program courses, annual GPA, and EPT scores (including subscores). In addition, students completed an academic self-concept scale. To obtain additional information about success in first-year business courses, instructors in two required courses were interviewed about the academic and language requirements in their courses and the profile of successful students. Correlations between the students’ course grades, GPA, EPT scores, and ASC score were calculated. The instructor interviews were analyzed using a content analysis procedure. The findings from all data sources were triangulated and show that language ability, ASC, and other factors impact academic success during the first year in a business program. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

The Development of Implicit Memory From Infancy to Childhood: On Average Performance Levels and Interindividual Differences

The present multimethod longitudinal study aimed at investigating development and stability of implicit memory during infancy and early childhood. A total of 134 children were followed longitudinally from 3 months to 3 years of life assessing different age‐appropriate measures of implicit memory. Results from structural equation modeling give further evidence that implicit memory is stable from 9 months of life on, with earlier performance predicting later performance. Second, it was found that implicit memory is present from early on, and no age‐related improvements are found from 3 months on. Results are discussed with respect to the basic brain structures implicit memory builds on, as well as methodological issues.     

A Cross-cultural Test of the Spiral of Silence Theory in Singapore and the United States1

This study examines the influence of individual-level characteristics on the spiral of silence effect in two countries, Singapore and the United States, making it the first cross-cultural test of the theory and thereby addressing a gap in the literature highlighted by Schefule and Moy (International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 12, 2000, 3–28). In two identical, representative telephone polls of 668 adults conducted in Singapore and 412 adults in Washington, DC, respondents were asked to indicate how likely they would be to discuss publicly two controversial issues: interracial marriage and equal rights for homosexuals. The proposed model for predicting outspokenness adds a variety of new predictors, such as culturally influenced self-concepts, fear of isolation, and communication apprehension, along with other more traditional predictors of outspokenness, such as a person's perception of the opinion climate, media exposure, issue salience, and demographics. The findings provide partial support for the spiral of silence hypothesis in Singapore, but not in the United States. Respondents’ perception of the future opinion climate in Singapore interacted with issue salience to influence their level of outspokenness; American respondents did not exhibit such an interaction effect. In both countries, however, outspokenness was associated with respondents’ perceived importance of the issue and their communication apprehension. Media exposure was not associated with outspokenness in either country.     

Do Science Teachers Distinguish Between Their own Learning and the Learning of Their Students?

Learning beliefs influence learning and teaching. For this reason, teachers and teacher educators need to be aware of them. To support students’ knowledge construction, teachers must develop appropriate learning and teaching beliefs. Teachers appear to have difficulties when analysing students’ learning. This seems to be due to the inability to differentiate the beliefs about their students’ learning from those about their own learning. Both types of beliefs seem to be intertwined. This study focuses on whether pre-service teachers’ beliefs about their own learning are identical to those about their students’ learning. Using a sample of pre-service teachers, we measured general beliefs about “constructivist” and “transmissive” learning and science-specific beliefs about “connectivity” and “taking pre-concepts into account”. We also analysed the development of these four beliefs during teacher professionalisation by comparing beginning and advanced pre-service teachers. Our results show that although pre-service teachers make the distinction between their own learning and the learning of their students for the general tenets of constructivist and transmissive learning, there is no significant difference for science-specific beliefs. The beliefs pre-service teachers hold about their students’ science learning remain closely tied to their own.     

The role of received social support and self-efficacy for the satisfaction of basic psychological needs in teacher education

We conducted a cross-sectional questionnaire study in 2016 with 697 student teachers from two Universities. The study used structural equation modelling to analyse the effects of received social support from family and fellow-students as well as perceived self-efficacy in relation to the basic psychological needs in teacher education. To measure the effects of received social support on the satisfaction of basic needs, we developed two scales adapting Mansfield’s qualitative approach on teacher resilience. Perceived self-efficacy turned out to be effected directly by received fellow-students’ support as well as having a mediation effect on higher levels of autonomy and competence, whereas received family support leads only to higher levels of autonomy. Especially received fellow-students’ support is directly connected to higher levels of need satisfaction. Finally, we discuss conclusions for shaping conditions of university-life according to experiencing what is necessary for a higher level of perception and satisfaction of basic psychological needs.