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Misreporting of sensitive characteristics in surveys is a major concern among survey methodologists and social scientists across disciplines. Indirect question formats, such as the Item Count Technique (ICT) and the Randomized Response Techniques (RRT), including the Crosswise Model (CM) and the Triangular Model (TM), have been developed to protect respondents’ privacy by design to elicit more truthful answers. These methods have also been praised to produce more valid estimates than direct questions. However, recent research has revealed a number of problems, such as the occurrence of false negatives, false positives, and dependencies on socioeconomic characteristics, indicating that at least some respondents may still cheat or lie when asked indirectly. This article systematically investigates (1) how well respondents comprehend and (2) to what extent they trust the ICT, CM and TM. We conducted cognitive interviews with academics across disciplines, investigating how respondents perceive, think about and answer questions on academic misconduct using these indirect methods. The results indicate that most respondents comprehend the basic instructions, but many fail to understand the logic and principles of these techniques. Furthermore, the findings suggest that comprehension and honest self-reports are unrelated, thus violating core assumptions about the effectiveness of these techniques., Survey Research Methods, Vol 13 No 3 (2019)

Background: During clinical clerkships students experience complex and challenging clinical situations related to problems beyond the domain of the “Medical Expert”. Workplace routine may leave little opportunity to reflect on these situations. The University of Zurich introduced a mandatory course directly after the clinical clerkship year (CCY) to work up these situations. Prior to the course each student submitted a vignette on a case he or she had perceived challenging during the CCY and which was not related to the domain of the “Medical Expert” role. In this paper we want to characterize these cases in respect to most prominent themes and related CanMEDS roles. The goal was to inform clinical supervisors about potential teaching demands during the CCY. Methods: All case vignettes submitted by a years’ cohort were analysed by three researchers in two ways: for the clinical characteristics and the main theme of the underlying problem and the most prominent CanMEDS roles involved. Themes of the underlying problem were aggregated to overarching topics and subsequently to main categories by pragmatic thematic analysis. Results: 254 case vignettes covered the whole spectrum of clinical disciplines. A wide range of underlying themes could be assigned to five main categories: “communication within team” (23.2%), “communication with patients and relatives” (24.8%), “patient behavior and attitudes” (18.5%), “clinical decision making” (24.0%), and “social and legal issues” (9.4%). Most frequent CanMEDS roles were “Communicator” (26.9%) and “Professional” (23.5%). Conclusions: Cases students perceived as challenging beyond the “Medical Expert” were reported from all clinical disciplines. These were mainly related to communicational and professional issues, mirrored by the CanMEDS roles “Communicator” and “Professional”. Therefore, supervisors in clinical clerkships should put an additional teaching focus on communication and professionalism., Hintergrund: Während des Praktischen Jahrs (in der Schweiz: Wahlstudienjahr, WSJ) werden die Studierenden mit komplexen Problemen konfrontiert, die oft nicht allein mit Mitteln im Bereich der CanMEDS-Rolle „Medical Expert“ gelöst werden können. Während der Arbeit im Spital bleibt meist wenig Zeit diese Situationen aufzuarbeiten. Die Universität Zürich hat daher einen Pflichtkurs eingeführt, welcher den Studierenden direkt nach dem Wahlstudienjahr Raum zur Reflexion gibt. Als Kursgrundlage reichen alle Studierenden eine Vignette zu einem klinischen Fall ein, den sie im WSJ als besonders herausfordernd erlebt haben und dessen Problem ausserhalb des Bereichs des „Medical Experts“ lag. Diese Arbeit untersucht, welche Themenbereiche in diesen Fallvignetten am häufigsten angesprochen wurden und im Bereich welcher CanMEDS-Rollen die Problematik angesiedelt war. Die Ergebnisse sollen klinischen Betreuenden helfen, mögliche herausfordernde Situationen zu erkennen und diese mit den Studierenden zu thematisieren. Methoden: Drei klinisch erfahrene Ärzte analysierten sämtliche Fallvignetten eines Studienjahres aus zwei Perspektiven: bezüglich der Hauptthematik des zugrundeliegenden Problems und bezüglich der hauptsächlich betroffenen CanMEDS-Rolle. Mittels induktiver Verfahren wurden die Hauptthematiken zu übergeordneten Kategorien zusammengefasst. Resultate: 254 eingereichte Fälle verteilten sich über sämtliche medizinische Fachgebiete. Die Hauptthematiken konnten fünf übergeordneten Kategorien zugewiesen werden: „Kommunikation im Team“ (23.2%), „Kommunikation mit Patienten und Angehörigen“ (24.8%), „Verhalten und Haltungen der Patienten“ (18.5%), „ärztliche Entscheidungsfindung“ (24.0%) und „Soziale und rechtliche Probleme“ (9.4%). Die am häufigsten vertretenen CanMEDS-Rollen waren „Communicator“ (26.9%) und „Professional“ (23.5%). Fazit: Die Vignetten zu herausfordernden klinischen Fällen stammten aus sämtlichen medizinischen Fachgebieten. Am häufigsten wurden Probleme in den Bereichen „Kommunikation“ und „Professionelles Handeln“ identifiziert. Dies spiegelt sich wieder in den am häufigsten vertretenen CanMEDS-Rollen „Communicator“ und „Professional“. Diese Befunde sollten betreuende Ärztinnen und Ärzte dafür sensibilisieren, dass Studierende im Wahlstudienjahr herausfordernde Situationen in diesen Bereichen erleben. Die Thematisierung im klinischen Kontext erscheint daher sinnvoll., GMS Journal for Medical Education; 36(3):Doc30

The purpose of this study was to identify the different profiles and patterns of progress in numerical skills of 6- to 10-year-old elementary school students with mild or moderate intellectual disa...

A phonological inventory is a repertoire of contrastive articulatory or manual gestures shared by a community of users. Whether spoken or signed, all human languages have a phonological inventory. In spoken languages, the phonological inventory is comprised of a set of segments (consonants and vowels) and suprasegmentals (stress and intonation) that are linguistically contrastive, either lexically or grammatically, in a particular language or one of its dialects. Sign languages also have phonological inventories, which include a set of linguistically contrastive signs made from movement, hand shape, and location. The study of phonological inventories is interesting because they tell us about the distribution, frequency, and diversity of gestures that individuals acquire and produce in the world’s 7,000 or so languages. Their study has also raised important empirical questions about the comparability of linguistic concepts across different languages and modalities, in the use of statistics and sampling in quantitative approaches to comparative linguistics, and in the study of language ontogeny and phylogeny over the course of language evolution. As such, some recent research highlights include the following: quantitative approaches suggest causal relationships between phonological inventory composition and gene-culture and language-environment coevolution; the study of de novo sign languages provides important insights into the emergence of phonology; and comparative animal communication studies suggest evolutionary speech precursors in phonological repertoires of nonhuman primates, and potentially in extinct hominids including Neanderthal.

M-fluctuation tests are a recently proposed method for detecting differential item functioning in Rasch models. This article discusses a generalization of this method to two additional item response theory models: the two-parametric logistic model and the three-parametric logistic model with a common guessing parameter. The Type I error rate and the power of this method were evaluated by a variety of simulation studies. The results suggest that the new method allows the detection of various forms of differential item functioning in these models, which also includes differential discrimination and differential guessing effects. It is also robust against moderate violations of several assumptions made in the item parameter estimation.

Temporarily going abroad is widely believed to increase academics' research performance. However, our understanding of the mechanisms linking academics' temporary stays abroad and subsequent research performance is tenuous. We investigate to what extent the accumulation of career capital (i.e., human and social capital) links temporary stays abroad and subsequent research performance by focusing on the conditions under which career capital is enhanced. Using matching and mediation analysis on a sample of 277 academics in German-speaking Europe, we show that it is the accumulation of social capital (i.e., contacts and social networks) rather than the accumulation of human capital (i.e., knowledge and skills) that accounts for the positive performance effects of temporarily going abroad. Furthermore, our study highlights the conditions (e.g., duration and number of stays abroad, number of different host institutions) that facilitate the accumulation of career capital during a stay abroad. Thus, our study informs academics on how to build their career capital and thus push their performance by temporarily going abroad.

Intellectual engagement (IE) refers to enjoyment of intellectual activities and is proposed as causal for knowledge acquisition. The role of IE for cognitive development was examined utilizing 2-year longitudinal data from 112 ninth graders (average baseline age: 14.7 years). Higher baseline IE predicted higher baseline crystallized ability but not changes therein, and was not associated with fluid ability. Furthermore, IE predicted change in school grades in language but not in mathematics grades or in standardized tests. These findings suggest that IE is not a major predictor of knowledge acquisition in adolescence, where degree of self-determination in intellectual behaviors may be relatively limited. Open questions for future research are addressed, including reciprocal longitudinal associations between IE and academic and cognitive development.

Peer victimization has been identified as a risk factor for depressive symptoms. The current study investigated the longitudinal interplay among social support, peer victimization and depressive symptoms in early adolescence. We specifically investigated the promotive and protective role of parental and friendship support on the longitudinal relationship between victimization and depressive symptoms. A total of 960 Swiss adolescents (49% female, Mage 13.2 years) completed an electronic questionnaire four times, with 6-month intervals. Trivariate cross-lagged models with latent longitudinal moderations were computed. The analyses confirmed that peer victimization was positively associated with changes in depressive symptoms, and depressive symptoms were positively associated with changes in victimization. Furthermore, bidirectional longitudinal associations between both parental and friendship support and depressive symptoms were found, while neither parental nor friendship support was found to be longitudinally associated with peer victimization. Further, neither parental nor friendship support moderated the longitudinal relationship between victimization and depressive symptoms. Thus, the present results suggested that parental and friendship support were promotive factors for adolescents' well-being, while neither parental, nor friendship support buffered the effect of victimization on depressive symptoms, thereby yielding no evidence for their longitudinal protective effect. published

The study examines the use of weblogs in teacher education internships and its impact on student stress levels self efficacy and reflective abilities. N=176 student teachers were randomly assigned to five groups. Four groups used weblogs (a) with emotion focused or with problem focused writing assignments in combination (b) with or without peer feedback during a 4 week teaching practice on a daily basis. The control group wrote a final reflection paper instead of blogging. Multilevel linear modeling of longitudinal questionnaire data shows that students with problem focused weblog writing assignments show a stronger development of self efficacy during the internship than the other groups especially when combined with peer feedback on blog postings. Groups do not differ with regard to stress levels and ability for reflection.

The philosophical debate on educational justice currently focusses on the Anglo-American situation. This essay brings in an additional perspective. It provides a justice-oriented critique of the segregated education systems in German-speaking countries. First, arguments that are commonly put forward in favour of these systems are rejected. Second, an additional argument against early tracking in education is formulated. It is claimed that segregated education systems tend to undermine children’s ‘right to an open future’. It is also explained that the segregated systems in Germany, Austria and Switzerland are linked to well-established systems of vocational education and training. It is argued, in this essay, that a workplace-based vocational system can be an important element of a just education system. The proposal is, then, to introduce a comprehensive school system in the first 8 or 9 school years that prepares students for both the vocational system and the academic track ( Gymnasium). Against this background, a so-called threshold conception of educational justice – that contains two different threshold levels – is formulated.

How do organizations respond to the loss of legitimacy in the context of disclosed corruption, and what drives the particular responses adopted? In this article, we study the organizational strategies of three multinational companies before, during, and after legitimacy loss due to disclosed organizational corruption. We explore why some multinational companies exceed regulatory expectations and choose radical strategies that substantially influence their environment by defining a new benchmark of anti-corruption practices, while others follow a more gradual approach. We build on the concept of legitimacy in institutional theory and focus on three strategies that organizations tend to adopt to regain legitimacy: isomorphic adaptation, moral reasoning, and strategic manipulation. Based on our empirical study, we suggest that when a transgression is accompanied by a strong legitimacy shock, transgressors are likely to see no alternative but to react both radically and instantly. We identify two distinct extremes of strategic manipulation: decoupling and substantial influence.

In this article, the authors introduce the special section on severe youth violence (SYV). As severe violence has significant negative consequences and youth commit more violence than other age groups, a developmental science approach is important to (a) understand pathways to SYV, (b) guide attempts to screen and assess SYV risk, and (c) inform novel, developmentally sensitive practices and policies to prevent and reduce SYV. The authors establish the theoretical and empirical contexts for the articles in this special section and explain how this developmental research on SYV can inform new lines of theoretical and empirical inquiry and innovative approaches to detect and respond to the risk of SYV.

INTRODUCTION Across Europe, great variations have been identified in the quality of preventive healthcare services delivered in primary care (PC). We aimed to assess the quality of secondary prevention in Swiss PC patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) and its evolution over six years. METHODS In the database of the Swiss «Family Medicine ICPC Research using Electronic Medical Records» (FIRE) project, we identified electronical record data of 2,807 patients with CHD treated for at least 15 months between 2009 and 2014. Primary outcome was the proportion of patients per year meeting four quality indicators of the British Quality and Outcome Framework (QOF): 1) blood pressure (BP) ≤ 150mmHg, 2) total serum cholesterol ≤ 5mmol/L, 3) prescription of anti-platelet therapy, 4) recommended drug prescriptions for patients with previous myocardial infarction (MI). Secondary outcome was the proportion of patients who were ineligible for indicator calculation because of incomplete record data. RESULTS From 2009 to 2014, 85.9, 83.1, 82.0, 81.9, 81.5, and 81.0 % of the patients met BP targets and 73.6, 77.0, 69.2, 73.6, 69.4, and 69.1% met cholesterol targets. Anti-platelet therapy was prescribed to 74.8, 76.1, 73.9, 70.2, 72.2, and 72.5 % of the patients. Finally, 83.3, 84.4, 87.5, 75.6, 89.8, and 89.2 % of the patients with previous MI received the recommended drug therapy. Changes over time were not significant. Missing BP records concerned 12.4-15.9 % of the patients, and missing cholesterol records 69.0-75.6 %. Females and patients with less cardiovascular comorbidities were more likely to show missing records. CONCLUSIONS Quality of secondary prevention did not improve when measured against QOF indicators in the period under investigation. Missing data in electronic medical records inhibited full quality indicator assessment. Especially in female patients and those with less cardiovascular comorbidity, closer medical documentation should be encouraged in order to facilitate quality of care measurements.

Aim: As part of the “Choosing wisely” campaign expert-driven recommendations of inappropriate interventions which lead to overdiagnosis and overtreatment are being published. The aim of our work was to describe an innovative method for developing recommendations together with general practitioners (GPs) and to compare the results with the “Choosing wisely” campaign lists as well as with the Swiss “Smarter medicine” shortlist. Methods: We asked 109 GPs who attended a medical education conference to form groups (of 5 to 7 GPs each) and develop three interventions that are relevant to their work and should be avoided. We then compared the most frequently suggested interventions with those of the “Choosing wisely” campaign list and the “Smarter medicine” campaign shortlist. Finally, we asked the Swiss Young GPs Association (JHaS) members for additional suggestions. Results: Five groups suggested avoidance of check-up examinations, especially in younger or asymptomatic individuals. Further unnecessary interventions, which were mentioned with similar frequency, included resting or exercise electrocardiography in asymptomatic individuals and cholesterol analysis in individuals older than 75 years, or statin therapy in primary prevention and/or high age. Four groups suggested avoiding arthroscopy or magnetic resonance imaging of the knee joint after an injury (in the absence of joint instability or blockade), and three groups recommended to avoid imaging diagnostic procedures in patients with unspecific headache (in the absence of red flags). There was no consistency between interventions of the GPs’ list and the list of the Swiss “Smarter medicine” official campaign. The interventions that were most frequently mentioned by the GPs are also present on the lists issued by are present on lists of medical societies that have joined the “Choosing wisely” campaign. The response rate from the Swiss Young GPs association members was impressively low. Conclusion: The perspective of users (GPs) is crucial for the development of lists of potentially inappropriate interventions. In order to enhance the degree of identification with and adherence to the recommendations. The interventions suggested in our study could lead to further recommendations on interventions to be avoided in primary care, ideally in collaboration with the “Smarter medicine” campaign. Empathic communication with patients about harms and benefits of potentially inappropriate interventions is crucial for the implementation of this policy.

Psychometric measurement models are only valid if measurement invariance holds between test takers of different groups. Global model tests, such as the well-established likelihood ratio (LR) test, are sensitive to violations of measurement invariance, such as differential item functioning and differential step functioning. However, these traditional approaches are only applicable when comparing previously specified reference and focal groups, such as males and females. Here, we propose a new framework for global model tests for polytomous Rasch models based on a model-based recursive partitioning algorithm. With this approach, a priori specification of reference and focal groups is no longer necessary, because they are automatically detected in a data-driven way. The statistical background of the new framework is introduced along with an instructive example. A series of simulation studies illustrates and compares its statistical properties to the well-established LR test. While both the LR test and the new framework are sensitive to differential item functioning and differential step functioning and respect a given significance level regardless of true differences in the ability distributions, the new data-driven approach is more powerful when the group structure is not known a priori—as will usually be the case in practical applications. The usage and interpretation of the new method are illustrated in an empirical application example. A software implementation is freely available in the R system for statistical computing.

As empirical studies have consistently shown, low achievement in mathematics at the secondary level can often be traced to deficits in the understanding of certain basic arithmetic concepts taught in primary school. The present intervention study in middle schools evaluated whether such learning deficits can be reduced effectively and whether the type of instruction influences students’ progress. The sample consisted of 123 students in 34 classes, split among one control group and two intervention groups: (a) small group instruction and (b) independent work partially integrated into regular classrooms. Over a period of 14 weeks, students were taught basic concepts, such as place value and basic operations. In addition, they practiced fact retrieval and counting (in groups). Multilevel regression analyses demonstrated that the interventions can be used to reduce given deficits.

In this debate about the value of introducing a supposed “practice-based view of strategy,” we respond to Bromiley and Rau’s defense of their approach. Coming from a background of two decades of research on strategy-as-practice, we focus on two major concerns about their initiative. The first is that the very use of the term “practice” would seem to obfuscate more than elucidate, especially given their definition of “practice” which strongly deviates from that already established in the social sciences generally. The second is that, by applying the term “practice” to strategy specifically, it becomes incumbent upon Bromiley and Rau to engage with and build upon the extensive practice-related strategy research that has gone before them.

Research on evaluation has mainly focused on the use of evaluation and has given little attention to the origins of evaluation demand. In this article, I consider the question of why parliamentarians demand evaluations with parliamentary requests. Building on the literature of delegation, I use a principal-agent framework to explain the origins of evaluation demand. In doing so, I argue that the parliamentarians mainly demand evaluations in order to hold the government accountable. The quantitative analysis shows that Swiss parliamentarians demand more evaluations if they have the impression that the administration does not implement the policies within their meaning. This finding suggests that parliamentarians demand evaluations in order to fulfill their oversight function towards the government. This conclusion could be relevant in order to understand the role of evaluations within the parliamentary arena.

Previous research suggests a link between the quality of teacher–student relationships and the students’ behavioral outcomes; however, the observational nature of past studies makes it difficult to attribute a causal role to the quality of these relationships. In the current study, therefore, we used a propensity score analysis approach to evaluate whether students who were matched on their propensity to experience a given level of relationship quality but differed on their actual relationship quality diverged on their concurrent and subsequent problem and prosocial behavior. Student/self, teacher, and parent- (only waves 1–3) reported data from 8 waves of the Zurich Project on the Social Development of Children and Youths (z-proso), a longitudinal study of Swiss youth among a culturally diverse sample of 7- to 15-year-olds were utilized. The initial sample included 1483 (49.4 % female) students for whom information relevant for this study was available. The sample represented families from around 80 different countries, from across all the continents; with approximately 42 % of the female primary caregivers having been born in Switzerland. Following successful matching, we found that students who reported better relationships with their teachers and whose teachers reported better relationships with them evidenced fewer problem behaviors concurrently and up to 4 years later. There was also evidence for an analogous effect in predicting prosocial behavior. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to prevention and intervention practices. ISSN:0047-2891 ISSN:1573-6601

This paper examines associations among parental and adolescent health behaviors and pathways to adulthood. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, we identify a set of latent classes describing pathways into adulthood and examine health-related predictors of these pathways. The identified pathways are consistent with prior research using other sources of data. Results also show that both adolescent and parental health behaviors differentiate pathways. Parental and adolescent smoking are associated with lowered probability of the higher education pathway and higher likelihood of the work and the work & family pathways (entry into the workforce soon after high school completion). Adolescent drinking is positively associated with the work pathway and the higher education pathway, but decreases the likelihood of the work & family pathway. Neither parental nor adolescent obesity are associated with any of the pathways to adulthood. When combined, parental/adolescent smoking and adolescent drinking are associated with displacement from the basic institutions of school, work, and family.

This paper analyses the formation and development of educational research institutions within the educational administration using the example of four research institutions in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. The analysis gives insight into the institutionalisation process of education research outside the university with special focus on the formation process, actors involved and goals defined. Since the end of the 1950s cantonal parliaments and later the Swiss Science Council requested educational research to remain competitive in a changing post-industrial world. The study strengthens the assumption that educational research conquered a place in the world of relevance as scientific approaches became a necessary precondition for legitimising political and administrative processes. The transnational scientific discourse was of indirect and direct importance although the modus of influence often remains covert. The empirical material shows that certain collective and individual actors played an important role during the years of institutionalisation.

With advances in medical science, the concept of agency has received increasing attention in biomedical ethics. However, most of the ethical discussion around definitions of agency has focused either on patients suffering from mental disorders or on patients receiving cutting-edge medical treatments in developed countries. Very little of the discussion around concepts of agency has focused on the situation of patients suffering from common diseases that affect populations worldwide. Therefore, the most widely-used definitions of agency may be not appropriate to analyse common diseases among large populations. The branch of social sciences known as development studies draw on their own definitions of the term agency that may provide a more applicable and accurate way of referring to common and general cases than the definitions currently used in bioethics. Moreover, the psychological Self-Determination Theory may improve the usefulness of these definitions in common situations. This article explains the characteristics and the shortcomings of current bioethical definitions of agency when they are applied to common medical conditions worldwide. A new, value-based concept of agency, informed by development studies, is proposed as more accurate and useful for biomedical ethics.

Center based child care has been struggling with poor health and high turnover rates of child care staff and their adverse impact on care quality for decades. Yet little is known about personal and structural antecedents of job resources and job demands that are valid predictors of health and turnover in the child care workforce. Research Findings: This study investigated job resources and job demands among child care staff of different education levels (491 lead teachers and 310 assistant teachers) from Switzerland. Results from t tests and hierarchical regression analyses indicated slightly higher job resources and job demands for lead teachers than for assistant teachers but similar antecedents of job resources and job demands. Overall center characteristics shaped job resources and job demands more strongly than staff characteristics. More specifically job resources were predicted by structural characteristics associated with professionalism in child care work whereas job demands were primarily dependent on adequate staffing. Practice or Policy: The findings suggest that center characteristics (e.g. work environment and staffing levels) should be targeted in order to increase job resources and reduce job demands which would in turn promote health and lower turnover rates among child care staff.

Knowledge workers face many challenges in the workplace: work is fragmented, disruptions are constant, tasks are complex, and work hours can be long. These challenges can affect knowledge workers’ stress, focus and awakeness, and in turn their interaction with the digital environment, the quality of work performed and their productivity in general. We report on a field study with 14 knowledge workers over an eight-week period in which we investigated, using experience sampling, how the workers experience stress and awakeness over time. During this field study, we also collected biometric data including heart- and skin-related measures, which we then used to investigate if it is possible to predict stress, focus and awakeness, in the moment. We observed and report on various trends in knowledge worker stress and awakeness levels over several weeks, finding that people tend to have certain “baseline” levels for these aspects. Moreover, we found that days with high levels of stress tend to cluster, similarly as the days with low awakeness. We further show that machine learning models can be built from the data of a single minimally invasive device to predict stress, focus, and awakeness. Overall, we found that our models were capable of large improvements in precision and recall in comparison to a random classifier for stress (25.9% increase over random for precision, 4.2% for recall) and awakeness (52.4% increase in precision, 40.8% in recall). The abstract concept of focus proved to be the hardest to predict (26.0% increase in precision, 27.8% decrease in recall).

Several frameworks and models have been developed to conceptualize teaching quality. Despite their merits, the field seems to be lacking a common language and structure in how teaching quality is delineated. This special issue argues that progress can be made in this respect by fostering focused discussions and collaborations among scholars working on teaching quality. In this introductory paper, we first consider some initial steps made to examine teaching quality more collectively, discuss the importance of intensifying this effort, identify related challenges, and consider ideas for addressing them. Then, we outline a format for collaboration which brings developers together to discuss and reflect upon their work and present a model which can provide a platform for such focused discussions. The approach undertaken in this special issue to facilitate collaborative discussions among three groups of scholars is presented, alongside the guiding questions and the empirical data considered in the following papers.

Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) is regarded as one of the most important models describing teachers' competencies for successfully teaching with technology. TPACK is most frequently assessed by means of self-report questionnaires, which beside their inherent methodological limitations present constraints related either to the validity, reliability, or practical applicability of existing instruments. Furthermore, the internal structure of the TPACK framework is a topic of debate. The two goals of this study were (1) to develop a valid and reliable short questionnaire for measuring TPACK (TPACK.xs), and (2) to use this instrument to investigate TPACK's internal relations, assessing whether the framework reflects an integrative or a transformative view regarding how the TPACK knowledge domains interact. An initial questionnaire of 42 items was administered to 117 pre-service upper secondary school teachers. Reliability analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were used to reduce the number of items per subscale and fit the model. Structural equation modelling investigated the internal relations between components. Results show that the final TPACK.xs questionnaire, consisting of 28 items, can be considered a valid and reliable instrument for assessing pre-service teachers' TPACK. Furthermore, the internal relations of knowledge components support a transformative view of the TPACK model.

Calibration of an item bank for computer adaptive testing requires substantial resources. In this study, we investigated whether the efficiency of calibration under the Rasch model could be enhanced by improving the match between item difficulty and student ability. We introduced targeted multistage calibration designs, a design type that considers ability-related background variables and performance for assigning students to suitable items. Furthermore, we investigated whether uncertainty about item difficulty could impair the assembling of efficient designs. The results indicated that targeted multistage calibration designs were more efficient than ordinary targeted designs under optimal conditions. Limited knowledge about item difficulty reduced the efficiency of one of the two investigated targeted multistage calibration designs, whereas targeted designs were more robust.

Trajectories of stability and change in bullying roles were examined through a longitudinal prospective study of 916 school students followed up biannually from age 11 to 17. Perpetrators and victims had relatively stable trajectories with most of the children remaining in the same role over time or becoming uninvolved. Bully/victim was the most unstable role with frequent transitions to perpetrators or victims. Developmental change in bullying roles was found with a decrease in physical forms over time in bullies and victims but with persistently high perpetration and victimization in bully/victims. These findings open new horizons in research and practice related to bullying and can be useful for its early detection or design of targeted interventions.

BACKGROUND The Bologna reform resulted in a drastic restructuring of pre-clinical training courses at the University of Zurich. The aim of this study was to assess student pre-clinical scaling/root planning skills after just 8.5 hours of manual training. MATERIAL AND METHODS Three consecutive classes of dental students (n = 41; n = 34; n = 48) were tasked with removing lacquer concrement from the maxillary left canine on a typodont using Gracey and universal (Deppeler M23A) curettes. At baseline (prior to instruction), a timed five-minute session of scaling/root planning was undertaken. The second scaling/root planning session was held immediately following training. Eight experienced dental hygienists and eight lay people served as positive and negative controls, using the same instruments and time limit, respectively. Instrumented teeth were collected, scanned and planimetrically analysed for the percentage of tooth surface cleaned. Statistical analyses were performed to assess the dental students' improvement after the training (Wilcoxon signed-rank test) and to compare it to that of laypeople and dental hygienists (Kruskal-Wallis rank sum test followed by Conover's post hoc test). RESULTS At baseline, the dental students' mean scaling scores of the cleaned surfaces were not significantly different than those of laypeople (29.8%, 31.0%, 42% vs 27.9%). However, after 8.5 hours of manual training, the students' ability to clean the maxillary tooth improved significantly and they achieved mean removal values of 61.7%, 79.5% and 76% compared to the 67.4% (P

A good match between item difficulty and student ability ensures efficient measurement and prevents students from becoming discouraged or bored by test items that are too easy or too difficult. Targeted test designs consider ability-related background variables to assign students to matching test forms. However, these designs do not consider that students might significantly differ in ability within the resulting groups. In contrast, multistage test designs consider students' performance during test taking to route them to the most informative modules. Yet, multistage test designs usually include one starting module of moderate difficulty in the first stage, which does not account for differences in ability. In this paper, we investigated whether measurement efficiency can be improved by targeted multistage test designs that consider ability-related background information for a targeted assignment at the beginning of the test and performance during test taking for selecting matching test modules. By means of simulations, we compared the efficiency of the traditional targeted test design, the multistage test (MST) design, and the targeted multistage test (TMST) design for estimating student ability. Furthermore, we analyzed the extent to which the efficiency of the different designs depends on the correlation between the ability-related background variable and the true ability, students' ability level and their categorization into an ability group, and the length of the starting module. The results indicated that TMST designs were generally more efficient for estimating student ability than targeted test designs and MST designs, especially if the ability-related background variable correlated high with and, thus, was a good indicator of, students' true ability. Furthermore, TMST designs were particularly efficient in estimating abilities for low- and high-ability students within a given population. Finally, very long starting modules resulted in less efficient estimation of low and high abilities than shorter starting modules. However, this finding was more prominent for MST than for TMST designs. In conclusion, TMST designs are recommended for assessing students from a wide ability distribution if a reliable ability-related background variable is available.

Valid cross-country comparisons of student learning and pivotal factors contributing to it, such as teaching quality, offer the possibility to learn from outstandingly effective educational systems across the world and to improve learning in classrooms by providing policy relevant information. Yet, it often remains unclear whether the instruments used in international large-scale assessments work similarly across different cultural and linguistic groups, and thus can be used for comparing them. Using PISA 2012 data, we investigated data comparability of three teaching quality dimensions, namely student support, classroom management, and cognitive activation using a newly developed psychometric approach, namely alignment. Focusing on 15 countries, grouped into five linguistic clusters, we secondly assessed the impact of linguistic similarity on data comparability. Main findings include that (1) comparability of teaching quality measures is limited when comparing linguistically diverse countries; (2) the level of comparability varies across dimensions; (3) linguistic similarity considerably enhances the degree of comparability, except across the Chinese-speaking countries. Our study illustrates new and more flexible possibilities to test for data comparability and outlines the importance to consider cultural and linguistic differences when comparing teaching-related measures across groups. We discuss possible sources of lacking data comparability and implications for comparative educational research. (DIPF/Orig.)

In diesem Beitrag werden drei zentrale, aber teils stark vernachl��ssigte Themen der Erziehungswissenschaft theoretisch-konzeptionell sowie empirisch aufgegriffen; a) die Bedeutung des p��dagogischen Ethos, b) die Frage nach dessen situationsspezifischer Artikulation (Situationsbegriff) sowie c) die Berufsbildungsforschung. Mittels einer empirischen Studie mit Berufsbildenden im Kochgewerbe wird anhand von vier sachbezogenen bzw. personenbezogenen Szenarien das p��dagogische Ethos operationalisiert. Die Ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass der Kontext sowohl das Entscheidungs- als auch das Begr��ndungshandeln der befragten Berufsbildenden beeinflusst. Des Weiteren zeigt sich, dass sich die erfahrene Herausforderung als auch die Anzahl der Lernenden in den beiden sachbezogenen Szenarien als bedeutsam f��r das p��dagogische Ethos erwiesen. (DIPF/Orig.), In this contribution three relevant, but mostly neglected topics within educational research are addressed theoretical-conceptually as well as empirically. These topics are a) the importance of pedagogical ethos, b) the question of its situation-specific articulation as well as c) research on vocational education and training. By means of an empirical study with vocational in-company trainers in the catering industry, the pedagogical ethos is operationalized based on four content- and person-related scenarios. The results indicate, that context influences the trainers' decisions and their reasoning. More - over, in terms of the content-related scenarios, it was found that challenges experienced by trainers as well as the number of apprentices being supervised influenced pedagogical ethos significantly. (DIPF/Orig.)

Introduction. Teachers and researchers often need to evaluate word decoding skill in group-wise and in a short time. The LEO-1-min test is created to measure word reading through a lexical decision procedure where the examinee identifies pseudowords in a list of frequent words.Objetive. To examine the reliability and validity of LEO-1-min, a silent word reading test, suitable for quick assess of reading abilities in a wide age range of students.Method. Participants were 284 children from 1st to 6th grade of a subsidized Primary School. We created four alternate forms of the LEO-1-min, each with 180 stimuli (132 words and 48 pseudowords).Results. The results show an adequate parallel forms reliability of the scores (range rs = from 0.57 to 0.81). High correlations were found between the scores on the LEO-1-min and the scores on a standardized reading aloud test. The discriminant analysis of the scores on the LEO–1-min shows a high level of success in predicting the oral word decoding performance.Discussion and Conclusion. LEO-1-min reliability is acceptable to good. Lexical decision in LEO-1-min and oral reading are highly correlated, which support using lexical decision as a groupwise test to screen for poor word readers. Form A of the test and provisional scales are presented for each primary grade.

We explored the ability of children to adapt their communication to the needs of their communication partner. Monolingual and bilingual 3-year-old children (N = 110) observed two puppets looking for puzzle pieces. One puppet showed its appreciation of the children's help, the other puppet wanted to solve the puzzle on its own. The children's communicative acts were coded in terms of level of ostension (how obviously they indicated the hiding place of the puzzle piece) and level of information (how clearly they indicated the location). Monolinguals and bilinguals were equally helpful and informative. In contrast, only bilingual children adapted their level of ostension selectively between the two puppets. These findings point to the greater skills of bilinguals to adapt their communication accordingly.

The current study investigated links between students' level of perceived challenge (being over- or underchallenged) and students' career aspirations . We hypothesized indirect effects of over- and underchallenge on career aspirations via academic self-concept and academic trait boredom and tested our hypotheses in a sample of N = 662 Swiss eleventh grade students in the domains of German, French, and mathematics. Our results were consistent across all three domains and showed that being overchallenged had a negative impact on academic self-concept. Lower academic self-concept, in turn, was associated with decreased career aspirations. Being underchallenged enhanced academic self-concept, which was positively related to students' career aspirations. Further, both being over- and underchallenged enhanced students' domain-specific boredom experiences resulting in a decrease in their career aspirations. As such, the effect of being underchallenged was of particular importance as its influence on career aspirations via academic trait boredom was negative, whereas via academic self-concept there was a positive indirect effect.

Background Item position effects have been a common concern in large-scale assessments as changing the order of items in booklets may have an undesired effect on test performance. If every test taker would be affected by the effect in the very same way, comparisons between groups of individuals would still be valid. However, research has shown that in addition to a general fixed effect of item positions, the extent of the effect varies considerably across individuals. These individual differences are referred to as persistence. Test takers with a high level of persistence are able to keep up their performance better throughout the test administration, whereas those with a lower level of persistence show a larger decline in their test performance. Methods The present study applied a multilevel extended item response theory (IRT) framework and used the data from the PISA 2006 science, 2009 reading, and 2012 mathematics assessments. The first objective of this study is to provide a systematic investigation of item position effects across the three PISA domains, partially replicating the previous studies on PISA 2006 and 2009. Second, this study aims to gain a better understanding of the nature of individual differences in position effects by relating them to student characteristics. Gender, socio-economic status, language spoken at home, and three motivational scales (enjoyment of doing the subject being assessed, effort thermometer, perseverance) were used as person covariates for persistence. Results This study replicated and extended the results found in previous studies. An overall negative item cluster position effect and significant individual differences in this effect were found in all the countries in the three PISA domains. Furthermore, the most frequently observed effect of person covariates on persistence is gender, with girls keeping up their performance better than boys. Other predictors showed little or inconsistent effects on persistence. Conclusions Our study demonstrated inter-individual differences as well as group differences in item position effects, which may threaten the comparability between persons and groups. The consequences and implications of item position effects and persistence for the interpretation of PISA results are discussed. ispartof: Large-Scale Assessments in Education vol:7 status: published

In this paper, we illuminate the vocational orientation process experienced by different groups of young people. In this context, risk factors, support, and the theory of bounded agency were considered in particular. The study answers the following questions: What patterns of risk can be identified within the vocational orientation process? How do identified risk patterns differ in relation to the perceived support provided by various support services? How do representatives of different risk patterns describe their vocational orientation process and how apparent are aspects of (bounded) agency? We carried out a mixed-methods study in Switzerland comprising a quantitative and a qualitative part. Latent class analysis revealed the existence of three distinct risk patterns that according to analysis of variance differ significantly concerning the perceived support of parents, siblings, friends, relatives, and teachers. Using content analysis, interviews revealed aspects of agency and aspects of boundaries concerning vocational orientation that differ in relation to the distinct risk patterns.

ive summarization typically relies on large collections of paired articles and summaries. However, in many cases, parallel data is scarce and costly to obtain. We develop an abstractive summarization system that relies only on large collections of example summaries and non-matching articles. Our approach consists of an unsupervised sentence extractor that selects salient sentences to include in the final summary, as well as a sentence abstractor that is trained on pseudo-parallel and synthetic data, that paraphrases each of the extracted sentences. We perform an extensive evaluation of our method: on the CNN/DailyMail benchmark, on which we compare our approach to fully supervised baselines, as well as on the novel task of automatically generating a press release from a scientific journal article, which is well suited for our system. We show promising performance on both tasks, without relying on any article-summary pairs., Comment: LREC 2020

Selective non-participation and attrition pose a ubiquitous threat to the validity of inferences drawn from observational longitudinal studies. We investigate various potential predictors for non-response and attrition of parents as well as young persons at different stages of a multi-informant study. Various phases of renewed consent from parents and young persons allowed for a unique comparison of factors that drive participation. The target sample consisted of 1675 children entering primary school at age seven in 2004. Seven waves of interviews, over the course of 10 years, measured levels of problem behavior as rated by children, parents, and teachers. In the initial study recruitment, where participation was driven by parental consent, non-response was highest amongst certain socially disadvantaged immigrant minority groups. There were fewer significant group differences at wave 5, when young people could be directly recruited into the study. Similarly, attrition was higher for some immigrant background groups. Methodological implications for future analyses are discussed.

Vocations and Learning, Vol 12, Nr 1 (2018), The Swiss teacher education and training system offers a practically and academically oriented path for aspiring commercial vocational education and training (VET) teachers. Although teachers’content knowledge (CK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) are considered crucial for teaching quality and students’achievement, little is known about Swiss VET teachers’Economics CK and PCK. Using assessments of teachers’economics CK and PCK as proxies of Bquality^we found that teachers regardless of practical or academic preparation were similar in CK and PCK once in the teaching profession. This finding contradicts popular belief that academic preparation with its selectivity and education would produce higher quality teachers.

We extend previous research by systematically investigating whether perceptions of scientific authorship vary between domains. Employing regulations for authorship of scientific journals as well as the Scientists Survey 2016 conducted by the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW), we provide a comprehensive picture of perceptions of scientific authorship across domains from the perspective of the supply side (journals) as well as the demand side (researchers). We find considerable differences in the perception of authorship across disciplines on both sides. Hence, not only domain-specific “formal norms,” but also domain-specific statements about ideals can be observed with regard to scientific authorship. The results have important implications: in order to avoid that researchers in disciplines with much narrower definitions of authorship are disadvantaged when compared to their colleagues from disciplines that rely on broader authorship definitions, domain-specific perceptions of authorship should be taken into account when allocating funding and jobs.

Children achieve their first language milestones initially in gesture and prosody before they do so in speech. However, little is known about the potential precursor role of those features later in...

We present the Zurich Cognitive Language Processing Corpus (ZuCo), a dataset combining electroencephalography (EEG) and eye-tracking recordings from subjects reading natural sentences. ZuCo includes high-density EEG and eye-tracking data of 12 healthy adult native English speakers, each reading natural English text for 4–6 hours. The recordings span two normal reading tasks and one task-specific reading task, resulting in a dataset that encompasses EEG and eye-tracking data of 21,629 words in 1107 sentences and 154,173 fixations. We believe that this dataset represents a valuable resource for natural language processing (NLP). The EEG and eye-tracking signals lend themselves to train improved machine-learning models for various tasks, in particular for information extraction tasks such as entity and relation extraction and sentiment analysis. Moreover, this dataset is useful for advancing research into the human reading and language understanding process at the level of brain activity and eye-movement., Scientific Data, 5, ISSN:2052-4463