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We consider groups defined by non-empty balanced presentations with the property that each relator is of the form, where x and y are distinct generators and is determined by some fixed cyclically reduced word that involves both a and b. To every such presentation we associate a directed graph whose vertices correspond to the generators and whose arcs correspond to the relators. Under the hypothesis that the girth of the underlying undirected graph is at least 4, we show that the resulting groups are non-trivial and cannot be finite of rank 3 or higher. Without the hypothesis on the girth it is well known that both the trivial group and finite groups of rank 3 can arise.
The different facets of professional performance of teachers are being debated in the current educational
research discussion. Both qualitative and quantitative test constructions exist for vignette-based measurement of
competence. For economic reasons, a procedure with closed-ended items is often favored, a reference is required for
determining and comparing alternative responses. This paper sketches out the procedure for identifying adequate
reactions to responses that we call a technical education expert norm (PCK-T). This expert norm is generated from
a multi-step expert survey and, in addition, reveals possible validation steps that can be derived for developing
teaching situations. After a content validation (N1 = 8) a multi-step quantitative survey with specialised subject
experts at schools and universities, departmental heads at public colleges for education and teacher training, as well
as experienced teachers of technology was carried out (N2 = 79; N3 = 76). In order to assess teaching competencies
of pre-service teachers using a vignette-based test procedure, the generated technical education expert norm (PCKT) allows adequate responses to be differentiated from (rather) inadequate responses in the teaching situations
This article presents an analysis of the formation of organized interest groups in the post-communist context and organizational populations over time. We test two theories that shed doubt on whether vital rates of interest groups are explained by individual incentives, namely, the political opportunity structure and population ecology theory. Based on an analysis of the energy policy and higher education policy organizations active at the national level in Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia, we find that while the period of democratic and economic transition indeed opened up the opportunity structure for organizational formations, it by no means presented a clean slate. Communist-era successor and splinter organizations survived the collapse of communism, and all three countries entered transition with relatively high density rates in both organizational populations. We also find partial support for the density dependence hypothesis. Surprisingly, the EU integration process, the intensity of legislative activity, and media attention do not seem to have meaningfully influenced founding rates in the two populations
The article analyses the strategies of Hungarian higher education interest organisations against the encroachments on academic freedom by Viktor Orbán's governments. We contrast the 2012–2013 and 2017–2019 protest waves and find that innovations in strategy came from new organisations in both periods, whereas established ones were rather passive or opted for the status quo. However, in the second period, new actors consciously declined to pursue wider systemic goals and aimed at building up formal organisations instead of loose, movement-like networks. The focus on keeping a unified front and interest representation on the workplace level did not change the overall outcome. Just like during the first period, the government was able to reach its goals without major concessions. Nevertheless, during the second protest wave the government was unable to divide and pacify its opponents, which stripped it of its legalistic strategy and revealed its authoritarianism.
When “software takes command”, people take fright – a reaction which frequently accompanies change or novelty. Their fears are understandable, but they also cloud people’s view of the potentials that digital tools and digital media hold for society and especially educational contexts. Their fears also define societal debates and contribute to a general lack of ambition when it comes to seizing the opportunities for broad collaboration in the design of a “digital society”. This paper identifies a selection of conceptual digital potentials, presents the initial findings of an ongoing study and uses these as a basis to formulate recommendations for reclaiming society’s formative authority over the shape of the digital in its midst.
Technology criticism and data literacy: The case for an augmented understanding of media literacy
(2020)
Reviewing the history of media literacy education might help us to identify how creating media as an approach can contribute to fostering knowledge, understanding technical issues, and to establishing a critical attitude towards technology and data. In a society where digital devices and services are omnipresent and decisions are increasingly based on data, critical analysis must penetrate beyond the “outer shell” of machines – their interfaces – through the technology itself, and the data, and algorithms, which make these devices and services function. Because technology and data constitute the basis of all communication and collaboration, media literate individuals must in the future also have a sound understanding of technology and data literacy. This article examines the relevance of this broader definition of literacy and delivers a forward-looking defense of media literacy education in schools. It also posits the thesis that the digital transformation represents a challenge, which is confronting society, politics, and education alike.
In this text, the findings of cognitive psychology will be used to tackle certain misconceptions in academic philosophical learning contexts. It will be shown that some techniques that university teachers often recommend and on which students often rely on for working on texts and acquiring the contents of them and other contents – like for example highlighting, notetaking, and summarization – are not that effective for long-term retention. At least not if some aspects are not considered. The aim is to show what empirical research has found out about effective learning and how this can help to create tasks that foster long-term retention of philosophical contents which also helps with training higher-order skills such as applying, reflecting, evaluating, and modifying these contents.
Reading research shows that phonological decoding skills and intelligence work mostly independent from each other. However, there is a variety of results on the relationship between reading skills and IQ measures. Studies in this field mainly focus on students with reading disabilities (RD) or students with intellectual disabilities (ID) and less on pupils with Special Educational Needs in Learning (SEN-L). We performed a secondary data analysis to evaluate differences in reading skills and fluid intelligence between students with (N = 144) and without (N = 157) SEN-L and the relationship between SEN-L, reading skills, and fluid intelligence. Participants completed a standardized screening of reading skills (SLS 2-9) and a German culture fair intelligence test (CFT 20-R). Students with SEN-L had lower scores in both tests. Correlations between both scores were smaller within the two groups than in the total sample. Implications of the findings are discussed.
Leading Schools towards Sustainability. Fields of Action and Management Strategies for Principals.
(2020)
Education is expected to support the development of a more sustainable way of thinking, working, and living. Although there is a broad range of literature on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), the role of principals in the implementation of sustainability and ESD in schools has rarely been taken into consideration. However, based on the results of school effectiveness research, one can assume that school principals exert a significant influence on ESD. Sustainability is a leadership issue. When a school aims at integrating sustainability and ESD, the principal plays a pivotal role. She or he has to support the endeavor wholeheartedly and credibly, organize a participative process of school development, emphasize sustainability and ESD in the daily life of the school, support teaching staff in the application of ESD, and offer students opportunities to launch their own initiatives. This article for the special issue on “Sustainability in leadership and education” is a theoretical concept paper based on a literature review and the authors’ conceptual work. It offers a model and seeks to support principals in leading their schools towards sustainability. Therefore, a framework of four stages of the integration of sustainability and ESD in a school is defined. For each of these stages, a number of practical actions and management strategies are suggested and explained in detail.
We report on a study on syllogistic reasoning conceived with the idea that subjects' performance in experiments is highly dependent on the communicative situations in which the particular task is framed. From this perspective, we describe the results of Experiment 1 comparing the performance of undergraduate students in 5 different tasks. This between-subjects comparison inspires a within-subject intervention design (Experiment 2). The variations introduced on traditional experimental tasks and settings include two main dimensions. The first one focuses on reshaping the context (the pragmatics of the communication situations faced) along the dimension of cooperative vs. adversarial attitudes. The second one consists of rendering explicit the construction/representation of counterexamples, a crucial aspect in the definition of deduction (in the classical semantic sense). We obtain evidence on the possibility of a significant switch in students' performance and the strategies they follow. Syllogistic reasoning is seen here as a controlled microcosm informative enough to provide insights and we suggest strategies for wider contexts of reasoning, argumentation and proof.
Competent use of the Internet to locate information is an important skill for today’s youth. Yet, many lack the knowledge and dispositions to engage in the processes necessary to effectively and efficiently find information on the Internet. As a result, various countries have incorporated references to the processes of online inquiry within their educational standards. Despite similarities in these standards, however, international comparisons are rare and have not produced insights into broader themes and patterns regarding how cognitive, metacognitive, and affective variables interact to influence outcomes on related measures of success, e.g., international assessments. The purpose of this research was two-fold: to examine the measurement invariance of a German-language version of the Survey of Online Reading Attitudes and Behaviors across a sample of participants from Germany and to compare the results with students from United States who completed the English-version of SORAB. The results justified comparisons across the samples with respect to the latent factor variables and comparisons yielded differences associated with cognitive and behavioral engagement, value/interest, and anxiety. No differences were noted with regard to self-regulation and efficacy for online reading. Implications are framed within broader contextual variables that may have been influential in producing the differences between the samples.
Although raised in the early days of research on teacher noticing, the question of context specificity has remained largely unanswered to this day. In this study, we build on our prior research on a specific aspect of noticing, namely teachers’ analysis of how representations are dealt with in mathematics classroom situations. For the purpose of such analysis, we examined the role of context on the levels of mathematical content area and classroom situation. Using a vignette-based test instrument with 12 classroom situations from the content areas of fractions and functions, we investigated how teachers’ analyses regarding the use of representations are related concerning these two mathematical content areas. Beyond content areas, we were interested in the question of whether an overarching unidimensional competence construct can be inferred from the participants’ analyses of the different individual classroom situations. The 12 vignettes were analysed by N = 175 secondary mathematics teachers with different degrees of teaching experience and their written answers provided the data for this study. Our findings show that the data fit the Rasch model and that all classroom situations contributed in a meaningful way to the competence under investigation. There was no significant effect of the mathematical content area on the participants’ analyses regarding the use of multiple representations. The results of the study indicate that explicitly considering questions of context can strengthen research into teacher noticing.
This thesis presents the results of a series of studies (on syllogisms, on the interpretation of mathematical statements and on probabilistic thinking) conducted with the idea that different, legitimate kinds of reasoning are used by humans in a contextual way, and that therefore no single logic (e.g., classical logic) can be expected to account for this diversity.
The crucial role of interpretation is highlighted, showing how intensional and extensional reasoning may be mobilized according to it. In particular, in communication settings, this depends on our adoption of a cooperative, credulous disposition, or on the contrary, of an adversarial, sceptical one.
In reasoning about mathematics in an educational setting, students (and teachers) may be enrolled in a back and forth between believing, doubting, making sense, giving arguments and proving. These changes in dispositions imply changes in the logics used. All the studies presented show, in different ways, evidence for cooperative, intensional reasoning and, in some cases, the possibility of a shift towards the acquisition of an extensional view. This suggest that if we expect as educators the adoption of specific norms and the development of reasoning skills from students, we need first to know well what the point of departure is where they are, and that it is often not at all “irrational”.
In Germany, secondary school students differ greatly in their science achievement, a dispersion that is far above the OECD average (Schiepe-Tiska, Rönnebeck, & Neumann, 2019). Immigrant students tend to be at the lower end of the scale in Germany – on average, they achieve substantially less well in science than non-immigrant students (OECD, 2016d), which is partially due to the German school system (Zoido, 2013). These differences in achievement translate into underrepresentation of immigrants in science-related jobs in Germany (OECD, 2008). Achievement and career choices are closely intertwined with academic self-concept (for an overview see Marsh & Craven, 2006). Regarding science self-concept, the pattern that immigrant students tend to score lower is present in many countries (e.g. Riegle-Crumb, Moore, & Ramos-Wada, 2011).
The goal of the present research project was to investigate these inequalities between immigrant and non-immigrant secondary school students. This was done focusing on secondary school students’ chemistry self-concepts. Chemistry self-concepts were focused on because achievement in chemistry is an important factor for careers in natural sciences (Cohen & Kelly, 2019). Research on chemistry self-concept has concentrated on young adults (e.g. Bauer, 2005; Xu & Lewis, 2011) and so little is known about secondary school students. Besides the impact of students’ migration background, the research project analyses the role that gender plays because gender has important effects on science self-concepts (e.g. Jurik, Gröschner, & Seidel, 2013; Riegle-Crumb et al., 2011; Wan & Lee, 2017).
A big challenge in this context was that the prevailing methods in academic self-concept research are prone to yield biased data (Byrne, 2002; Byrne et al., 2009). Although this was pointed out more than 15 years ago, the problem persists in science self-concept research. The present research project addresses this issue and presents a new mixed methods approach to culture-sensitive academic self-concept research. The term ‘culture’ is used in the sense of migration background, a concept that categorizes people’s migration histories in Germany. A combination of qualitative interview data and quantitative data permit an investigation of certain types of bias defined by Byrne and colleagues (2009). The pilot study operated with a chemistry self-concept questionnaire (N=116) and qualitative interviews (N=43). The main study was based on an extended questionnaire comprising several other scales (N=585) and deeper qualitative interviews (N=48).
The hypotheses based on the literature were that in Germany, (h1) immigrant students would show more negative chemistry self-concepts than non-immigrant students. (h2) Female students would show more negative chemistry self-concepts than male students. The third hypothesis (h3) was that the home environment has an important impact on students’ chemistry self-concepts. The first two hypotheses (h1 and h2) were not confirmed. Gender and migration background did not show a significant effect on students’ chemistry self-concepts. Instead, gender relations differ depending on the students’ migration background. Among students without a migration background, boys tend to have stronger chemistry self-concepts than girls. In contrast, among students with a Turkish migration background, girls tend to have stronger chemistry self-concepts. Existing science self-concept literature did not explain this.
Literature on gender relations in science in Turkey suggests that this interaction effect could be due to a more gender-neutral conception of science in Turkey. Slightly more women than men work in science in Turkey (OECD, 2009a) and girls achieve substantially better (Batyra, 2017a, 2017b). According to the third hypothesis (h3), the gender conceptions in Turkey could potentially be transmitted to students with a Turkish migration background in the home environment, through their parents or other people.
Science education literature did not provide a satisfying model for conceptualizing the influence of the home environment on students in the field of chemistry that would allow investigating the third hypothesis (h3). Therefore, the concept of chemistry capital was introduced based on the analysis of the interviews in the main study. Chemistry capital was developed based on the concept of science capital by Archer and colleagues (2015). Chemistry capital conceptualizes the resources a person possesses that have value in the field of chemistry. This encompasses social networks (e.g. knowing a chemist) as well as emotional and cognitive resources (e.g. attitudes towards chemistry and chemistry knowledge), and the engagement in chemistry-related activities. In particular, the concept allows analyzing the transmission processes of chemistry from the home environment to the individual student.
The qualitative analyses in the main study showed that the chemistry capital home environment influences the students in the field of chemistry in multiple ways. This supports hypothesis 3 (h3). Further, the data suggest that structural inequalities in the German school system might foster differences in chemistry. Students who already possess little chemistry capital in their home environments are in addition found more often at the type of school (Hauptschule) in which the proportion of chemistry teachers who do not hold a university degree in chemistry is the highest, depriving these students of another possible source of chemistry capital. Vice versa, students who already possess a lot of chemistry capital in their home environments more often attend school types (Gymnasium, Realschule) where also more formally qualified chemistry teachers are available, thus potentially widening the gap.
The mixed methods analysis in the main study suggested that a simple linear relationship between student chemistry self-concept and chemistry capital in the home environment does not exist. A study based on quantitative (or mixed methods) analyses of data of a larger sample on chemistry capital in the home environment and students’ chemistry self-concepts could provide further insights. It is not yet clear if the third hypothesis (h3) is true.
To sum up, the present research project thus advances the field of chemistry education in three regards: (i) it provides an approach to culture-sensitive academic self-concept. This approach proved to increase both the validity and the explanatory power of chemistry self-concept research. It is not chemistry-specific and can, thus, be used in other areas of research as well. (ii) The research discovered an interaction effect of gender and migration background on chemistry self-concept that was unknown in science education literature. (iii) It introduces and defines the concept of chemistry capital which permits to analyze chemistry education from a sociocultural perspective. Employing the concept of chemistry capital helps to shift the focus from the individual student to the resources a student possesses in the sociocultural context that help him or her succeed in the field of chemistry. This allows uncovering social inequalities in the field that need to be addressed in educational policy. Moreover, it can inspire intervention studies and application-focused research (e.g. approaches to culture-sensitive chemistry teaching).