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The Big Five personality traits play a major role in student achievement. As such, there is consistent evidence that students that are more conscientious receive better teacher-assigned grades in secondary school. However, research often does not support the claim that students that are more conscientious similarly achieve higher scores in domain-specific standardized achievement tests. Based on the Invest-and-Accrue Model, we argue that conscientiousness explains to some extent why certain students receive better grades despite similar academic accomplishments (i.e., achieving similar scores in domain-specific standardized achievement tests). Therefore, the present study examines to what extent the relationship between student personality and teacher-assigned grades consists of direct as opposed to indirect associations (via subject-specific standardized test scores). We used a representative sample of 14,710 ninth-grade students to estimate these direct and indirect pathways in mathematics and German. Structural equation models showed that test scores explained between 8 and 11% of the variance in teacher-assigned grades in mathematics and German. The Big Five personality traits in students additionally explained between 8 and 10% of the variance in grades. Finally, the personality-grade relationship consisted of direct (0.02 | β| ≤ 0.27) and indirect associations via test scores (0.01 | β| ≤ 0.07). Conscientiousness explained discrepancies between teacher-assigned grades and students’ scores in domain-specific standardized tests to a greater extent than any of the other Big Five personality traits. Our findings suggest that students that are more conscientious may invest more effort to accomplish classroom goals, but fall short of mastery.
Trapped between in and out : the post-institutional liminality of ex-prisoners in East Berlin
(2011)
Well-developed phonological awareness skills are a core prerequisite for early literacy development. Although effective phonological awareness training programs exist, children at risk often do not reach similar levels of phonological awareness after the intervention as children with normally developed skills. Based on theoretical considerations and first promising results the present study explores effects of an early musical training in combination with a conventional phonological training in children with weak phonological awareness skills. Using a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design and measurements across a period of 2 years, we tested the effects of two interventions: a consecutive combination of a musical and a phonological training and a phonological training alone. The design made it possible to disentangle effects of the musical training alone as well the effects of its combination with the phonological training. The outcome measures of these groups were compared with the control group with multivariate analyses, controlling for a number of background variables. The sample included N = 424 German-speaking children aged 4–5 years at the beginning of the study. We found a positive relationship between musical abilities and phonological awareness. Yet, whereas the well-established phonological training produced the expected effects, adding a musical training did not contribute significantly to phonological awareness development. Training effects were partly dependent on the initial level of phonological awareness. Possible reasons for the lack of training effects in the musical part of the combination condition as well as practical implications for early literacy education are discussed.
The present article analyzes the socio-economic background of maths teachers in Germany and its relation to career-related decisions and job-related convictions. These analyzes is based on data collected through questionnaires answered by 1126 maths teachers working at a sample of secondary schools representative of Germany. Following Bourdieu's theory, the authors examine whether the economic and cultural conditions prevailing in the teachers' families of origin are related to their decision to pursue this specific professional career or to their job-related convictions. Furthermore, it is analyzed in how far teachers, in their everyday work in the classroom, meet students from groups of origin foreign to the teachers themselves. The results show that the teachers, socio-economic background has no systematic relation to either their career-related decisions or their job-related convictions.
German orthography systematically marks all nouns (even other nominalized word classes) by capitalizing their first letter. It is often claimed that readers benefit from the uppercase-letter syntactic and semantic information, which makes the processing of sentences easier (e.g., Bock et al., 1985, 1989). In order to test this hypothesis, we asked 54 German readers to read single sentences systematically manipulated by a target word (N). In the experimental condition (EXP), we used semantic priming (in the following example: sick → cold) in order to build up a strong expectation of a noun, which was actually an attribute for the following noun (N+1) (translated to English e.g., “The sick writer had a cold (N) nose (N+1) …”). The sentences in the control condition were built analogously, but word N was purposefully altered (keeping word length and frequency constant) to make its interpretation as a noun extremely unlikely (e.g., “The sick writer had a blue (N) nose (N+1) …”). In both conditions, the sentences were presented either following German standard orthography (Cap) or in lowercase spelling (NoCap). The capitalized nouns in the EXP/Cap condition should then prevent garden-path parsing, as capital letters can be recognized parafoveally. However, in the EXP/NoCap condition, we expected a garden-path effect on word N+1 affecting first-pass fixations and the number of regressions, as the reader realizes that word N is instead an adjective. As the control condition does not include a garden-path, we expected to find (small) effects of the violation of the orthographic rule in the CON/NoCap condition, but no garden-path effect. As a global result, it can be stated that reading sentences in which nouns are not marked by a majuscule slows a native German reader down significantly, but from an absolute point of view, the effect is small. Compared with other manipulations (e.g., transpositions or substitutions), a lowercase letter still represents the correct allograph in the correct position without affecting phonology. Furthermore, most German readers do have experience with other alphabetic writing systems that lack consistent noun capitalization, and in (private) digital communication lowercase nouns are quite common. Although our garden-path sentences did not show the desired effect, we found an indication of grammatical pre-processing enabled by the majuscule in the regularly spelled sentences: In the case of high noun frequency, we post hoc located parafovea-on-fovea effects, i.e., longer fixation durations, on the attributive adjective (word N). These benefits of capitalization could only be detected under specific circumstances. In other cases, we conclude that longer reading durations are mainly the result of disturbance in readers' habituation when the expected capitalization is missing.
Intelligence, as well as working memory and attention, affect the acquisition of mathematical competencies. This paper aimed to examine the influence of working memory and attention when taking different mathematical skills into account as a function of children’s intellectual ability. Overall, intelligence, working memory, attention and numerical skills were assessed twice in 1868 German pre-school children (t1, t2) and again at 2nd grade (t3). We defined three intellectual ability groups based on the results of intellectual assessment at t1 and t2. Group comparisons revealed significant differences between the three intellectual ability groups. Over time, children with low intellectual ability showed the lowest achievement in domain-general and numerical and mathematical skills compared to children of average intellectual ability. The highest achievement on the aforementioned variables was found for children of high intellectual ability. Additionally, path modelling revealed that, depending on the intellectual ability, different models of varying complexity could be generated. These models differed with regard to the relevance of the predictors (t2) and the future mathematical skills (t3). Causes and conclusions of these findings are discussed.
In intervention research, single-case experimental designs are an important way to gain insights into the causes of individual changes that yield high internal validity. They are commonly applied to examine the effectiveness of classroom-based interventions to reduce problem behavior in schools. At the same time, there is no consensus on good design characteristics of single-case experimental designs when dealing with behavioral problems in schools. Moreover, specific challenges arise concerning appropriate approaches to analyzing behavioral data. Our study addresses the interplay between the test power of piecewise regression analysis and important design specifications of single-case research designs. Here, we focus on the influence of the following specifications of single-case research designs: number of measurement times, the initial frequency of the behavior, intervention effect, and data trend. We conducted a Monte-Carlo study. First, simulated datasets were created with specific design conditions based on reviews of published single-case intervention studies. Following, data were analyzed using piecewise Poisson-regression models, and the influence of specific design specifications on the test power was investigated. Our results indicate that piecewise regressions have a high potential of adequately identifying the effects of interventions for single-case studies. At the same time, test power is strongly related to the specific design specifications of the single-case study: Few measurement times, especially in phase A, and low initial frequencies of the behavior make it impossible to detect even large intervention effects. Research designs with a high number of measurement times show robust power. The insights gained are highly relevant for researchers in the field, as decisions during the early stage of conceptualizing and planning single-case experimental design studies may impact the chance to identify an existing intervention effect during the research process correctly.