Prior knowledge activation: how different concept mapping tasks lead to substantial differences in cognitive processes, learning outcomes, and perceived self-efficacy

Two experiments investigated the effects of characteristic features of concept mapping used for prior knowledge activation. Characteristic demands of concept mapping include connecting lines representing the relationships between concepts and labeling these lines, specifying the type of the semantic relationships. In the first experiment, employing a within-subjects design, 20 psychology students completed a label-provided-lines economics mapping task and then a create-and-label-lines meteorology mapping task or vice versa. The analysis of 40 think-aloud protocols indicated more elaboration processes for the label-provided-lines task than for the create-and-label-lines task. On the other hand, the protocols indicated more model-construction and organization processes in the create-and-label-lines task. The second experiment used the same variation but focused on learning outcomes and perceived self-efficacy as dependent measures. Forty-two psychology students were randomly assigned to either a label-provided-lines mapping task or a create-and-label-lines mapping task. Subsequently, both groups completed a learning phase in a hypertext environment and a posttest. Results showed substantial differences in learning outcomes and perceived self-efficacy in favor of the label-provided-lines prior knowledge activation task. The findings are congruent with coherence effects found in text-comprehension research and support the position that concept mapping should not be seen as a unitary method but be differentiated according to the specific tasks to be completed.     

Pädagogisches Wissen von angehenden Lehrkräften

Whilst experience of testing subject-specific knowledge of prospective and practicing teachers is generally available, the standardized capture of their cross-subject, pedagogic knowledge remains a new field of inquiry. This contribution will present a way of defining and capturing this knowledge with reference to standards for teacher training and insights from general didactic and teaching theory. We focus on five vocational requirements with which teaching staff see themselves confronted: structuring lessons, motivation, dealing with heterogeneity, leading lessons and assessing performance. Using the Rasch-Model, we carried out an empirical study on the structure of cross-subject knowledge based on 802 student teachers. As expected, the model, which differentiates between the five areas of knowledge, reflects the data better than a model, which assumes pedagogic knowledge to have a homogeneous structure. This provides empirical insights into long-going theoretical discussions on pedagogical knowledge. The results also reflect the context of typical learning opportunities in teacher training.     

Core Competencies: The Challenge For Graduate Peace and Conflict Studies Education

This article uses a case study of the assessment of a graduate program in negotiations and conflict management as a springboard for discussing several critical, but unanswered questions in our field. It raises questions regarding the lack of clear core competencies and expectations regarding curricula at the graduate-level of peace and conflict studies programs, as well as concerns over how educators in this field can or should assess their own work and train students for practice. It also addresses, via a comparative case analysis in Tajikistan, the degree to which the competencies and pedagogical approaches in this field are culturally bound. The picture that emerges from these case studies suggests that there have been important omissions in the way that the varied educational programs and the larger peace and conflict studies field itself have developed thus far.     

An NCME Instructional Module on Booklet Designs in Large-Scale Assessments of Student Achievement: Theory and Practice

In most large-scale assessments of student achievement, several broad content domains are tested. Because more items are needed to cover the content domains than can be presented in the limited testing time to each individual student, multiple test forms or booklets are utilized to distribute the items to the students. The construction of an appropriate booklet design is a complex and challenging endeavor that has far-reaching implications for data calibration and score reporting. This module describes the construction of booklet designs as the task of allocating items to booklets under context-specific constraints. Several types of experimental designs are presented that can be used as booklet designs. The theoretical properties and construction principles for each type of design are discussed and illustrated with examples. Finally, the evaluation of booklet designs is described and future directions for researching, teaching, and reporting on booklet designs for large-scale assessments of student achievement are identified.     

Universal service in the European Union

Since the late 1980s, the European Union (EU) has pursued a program of comprehensive telecommunications liberalization. The increased reliance on competition necessitated the establishment of explicit universal service policies. European universal service policies define the scope and cost of universal service as well as permissible funding mechanisms. Emphasizing competition over social goals, the EU has adopted a rather narrow version of universal service. Future revisions may provide an opportunity to adopt a more ambitious universal service model.     

Die Beichte und ihre Bedeutung im Sozialisationsprozess

Mehr als 500 Jahre lang geh?rte die Beichte als christliche Version institutionalisierter Selbstthematisierung und als ritualisierter Ausdruck einer spezifisch christlichen Schuldkultur zu den grundlegenden Sozialisationserfahrungen und zur allt?glichen Fr?mmigkeitspraxis vieler Menschen. Dieser Beitrag versucht deshalb zun?chst, die Vorgeschichte und die Geschichte der christlich-katholischen Beichte zu skizzieren. Beim Blick auf die wichtigsten Merkmale und Elemente der Beichte zeigt sich dann geradezu paradigmatisch, wie unter liturgisch geregelten und historisch sich wandelnden Bedingungen gesellschaftliche Normen, religi?se Vorschriften, rhetorische Traditionen und individuelles Erleben ineinander greifen. Eine Skizze zu wichtigen Wirkungen und Funktionen des Instituts Beichte bekr?ftigt schlie?lich noch einmal ihre sozialisatorischen Effekte und erweist darüber hinaus die ihr zugrunde liegenden Widersprüche und Paradoxa menschlicher Selbstreflexion: Widersprüche, die im traditionellen p?dagogischen Diskurs als Grundprobleme der Bildungstheorie behandelt werden.     

Learning from television and books: A dutch replication study based on salomon's model

According to Salomon's (1981) model, children usually invest less effort in television viewing than in book reading, with the result that information from television is less deeply processed than information from books. The amount of invested mental effort, in its turn, is assumed to depend on the way a medium is perceived. Most children perceive television as an easy medium and books as a difficult one. In this article, Salomon's model and the research in which the model was tested are discussed, and a replication study is presented. The study determines the internal structure of the Dutch versions of Salomon's instruments and tests some predictions following from the model. Unlike their American peers, Dutch children do not unconditionally perceive television as an easy medium.     

An analysis of evaluation campaigns in ad-hoc medical information retrieval: CLEF eHealth 2013 and 2014

Since its inception in 2013, one of the key contributions of the CLEF eHealth evaluation campaign has been the organization of an ad-hoc information retrieval (IR) benchmarking task. This IR task evaluates systems intended to support laypeople searching for and understanding health information. Each year the task provides registered participants with standard IR test collections consisting of a document collection and topic set. Participants then return retrieval results obtained by their IR systems for each query, which are assessed using a pooling procedure. In this article we focus on CLEF eHealth 2013 and 2014s retrieval task, which saw topics created based on patients’ information needs associated with their medical discharge summaries. We overview the task and datasets created, and the results obtained by participating teams over these two years. We then provide a detailed comparative analysis of the results, and conduct an evaluation of the datasets in the light of these results. This twofold study of the evaluation campaign teaches us about technical aspects of medical IR, such as the effectiveness of query expansion; the quality and characteristics of CLEF eHealth IR datasets, such as their reliability; and how to run an IR evaluation campaign in the medical domain.     

Paraproteinämien / Multiples Myelom

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Utility of the PASS theory and cognitive assessment system for Dutch children with and without ADHD

This study examined the utility of the Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, Successive (PASS) theory of intelligence as measured by the Cognitive Assessment System (CAS) for evaluation of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The CAS scores of 51 Dutch children without ADHD were compared to the scores of a group of 20 Dutch children with ADHD. The scores of the Dutch children were also compared to American standardization samples of children with and without ADHD. The findings showed that children with ADHD in both countries demonstrated relatively low scores on the Planning and Attention scales of the CAS, but average scores on the Simultaneous and Successive scales. These findings are similar to previously published research suggesting that the PASS theory, as operationalized by the CAS, has sensitivity to the cognitive processing difficulties found in some children with ADHD.