Program Evaluation and Archives: An Essay on a Research Agenda

The author begins with comments on the importance and position of program evaluation (PE), mostly in the context of European archives. These observations, based on personal experience and on a preliminary literature review, show a definitive need for PE, despite its weak position in the managerial activities of archives. Next, the author highlights some special aspects of the evaluation of archival programs. Finally, the author draws conclusions from his general remarks and from his reading of the articles included in this thematic issue ofArchival Science. He outlines some tendencies and shifts in the definition and purposes of evaluation and a short research agenda, containing the most important issues for further development of PE in archives.     

Olympische Spiele als mediale Vermögensgegenstände

On the basis of the media coverage of the Olympic Games and the underlying strategic positioning, it is shown how important it is to illuminate this topic from an interdisciplinary perspective. Special emphasis is placed on the coupling of resource-based theory and network theories and illustrates particularly well the new interplay between management, organizational communication and mass communication. In the past decade the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has been transformed in ever increasing dimensions into a media corporation. The Olympic values and principles, innovations and creation potentials are the focal points of this strategy as tangible assets of the media.     

Instructional design for advanced learners: Establishing connections between the theoretical frameworks of cognitive load and deliberate practice

Cognitive load theory (CLT) has been successful in identifying instructional formats that are more effective and efficient than conventional problem solving in the initial, novice phase of skill acquisition. However, recent findings regarding the “expertise reversal effect” have begun to stimulate cognitive load theorists to broaden their horizon to the question of how instructional design should be altered as a learner's knowledge increases. To answer this question, it is important to understand how expertise is acquired and what fosters its development. Expert performance research, and, in particular, the theoretical framework of deliberate practice have given us a better understanding of the principles and activities that are essential in order to excel in a domain. This article explores how these activities and principles can be used to design instructional formats based on CLT for higher levels of skills mastery. The value of these formats for e-learning environments in which learning tasks can be adaptively selected on the basis of online assessments of the learner's level of expertise is discussed. In their preparation of this article, the first and last authors were supported by an Internationalization grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO, The Hague, project number 411-01-010).     

Does immigration background matter? How teachers’ predictions of students’ performance relate to student background

Accurate teacher evaluations of student performance are crucial for effective teaching. This study examined whether students’ immigration and language background affect teachers’ evaluations. Multilevel analyses tested whether teachers overestimate the performance of immigrant relative to that of non-immigrant students. As part of the German PISA 2003 assessment, 305 teachers predicted the performance of seven of their students on two mathematics problems of different linguistic complexity. Results revealed an interaction effect of students’ language background and linguistic complexity of the problem on teachers’ predictions. Teachers overestimated the performance of bilingual students more than the performance of monolingual immigrant or non-immigrant students on a linguistically complex problem. Teachers need to consider both students’ language background and linguistic demands of the material used to appropriately support bilingual students.