Forum B.1: Deutschstunden – zur Lehrerausbildung : Statement

Dieser Text wurde verlesen als Statement auf dem Internationalen Colloquium "Perspektiven der Germanistik im 21. Jahrhundert", das vom 4. bis 6. April 2013 im Schloss Herrenhausen in Hannover stattfand. Er bildete die Grundlage für eine Podiumsdiskussion zum Thema "Deutschstunden – zur Lehrerbildung" in der Sektion "Jenseits von Bologna – Studium und Beruf"

Getting to Green: Niche-driven or Government-led Entrepreneurship and Sustainability in the Wine Industry

Through the framework of Michael Porter’s five forces, this article compares sustainability in the Oregon and British Columbia wine industries. After describing the contrasting characteristics of the green niche model and the government-led model of environmental change, the article analyzes the emerging challenges for each type of change.The distinct sources for profitability and future innovation suggests diversity within the sustainability movement and two very different processes of translating environmental values into entrepreneurial practice

Supervised Topical Key Phrase Extraction of News Stories using Crowdsourcing, Light Filtering and Co-reference Normalization

Fast and effective automated indexing is critical for search and personalized services. Key phrases that consist of one or more words and represent the main concepts of the document are often used for the purpose of indexing. In this paper, we investigate the use of additional semantic features and pre-processing steps to improve automatic key phrase extraction. These features include the use of signal words and freebase categories. Some of these features lead to significant improvements in the accuracy of the results. We also experimented with 2 forms of document pre-processing that we call light filtering and co-reference normalization. Light filtering removes sentences from the document, which are judged peripheral to its main content. Co-reference normalization unifies several written forms of the same named entity into a unique form. We also needed a "Gold Standard" - a set of labeled documents for training and evaluation. While the subjective nature of key phrase selection precludes a true "Gold Standard", we used Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to obtain a useful approximation. Our data indicates that the biggest improvements in performance were due to shallow semantic features, news categories, and rhetorical signals (nDCG 78.47% vs. 68.93%). The inclusion of deeper semantic features such as Freebase sub-categories was not beneficial by itself, but in combination with pre-processing, did cause slight improvements in the nDCG scores.Comment: In 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012

Putting Transitional Justice on Trial: Democracy and Human Rights in Post-Civil War Societies

This paper empirically tests the influence of transitional justice mechanisms (TJMs) – particularly truth commissions and war crimes tribunals – on post-civil war societies. The transitional justice literature advocates the effectiveness of such mechanisms in bringing about the reconciliation necessary to facilitate democratization and respect for human rights. However, few cross-national empirical studies exist to evaluate these claims. This article compares current levels of human rights abuses and democratization in post-civil war countries that have used TJMs with post-civil war countries that have not. These results support the advocates of war crimes tribunals: countries that have used tribunals have higher levels of democratization and human rights than societies that did not. However, the results show that truth commissions have less influence on democratization and human rights

Examining the Instructional Priorities of a Secondary Education Teacher Preparation Program Utilizing an Integrated Approach to Assessment Education

This study examined the instructional priorities of a four-year undergraduate secondary education program that does not offer an assessment-specific course, but instead integrates assessment instruction throughout the broader curriculum. An alignment method was utilized to better understand the program’s instructional priorities for teaching about assessment in comparison to the locally-used professional teaching standards and the locally-used teacher accreditation performance assessment. Areas of both alignment and misalignment were found in three dimensions: categorical concurrence (CC), depth of knowledge (DOK), and range of knowledge (ROK). Findings include course syllabi objectives that were written at a broader ROK level than the other two sources, syllabi and performance assessment objectives that were written at a higher DOK level than the standards, and a variety of approaches to teaching the concepts of formative assessment. Implications for teacher education are discussed

Teaching to Assess: An Evaluation of Assessment Education for Secondary Teacher Candidates

This study examined the assessment instruction of a four-year undergraduate secondary education program and its alignment to the teaching standards and the summative teacher licensure assessment. Document analyses were conducted on the program’s syllabi as well as the assessment portions of the InTASC standards and the handbook of the edTPA. Results highlighted several areas of misalignment in the areas of categorical concurrence, depth of knowledge, and range of knowledge. Also of note, preservice teachers in different secondary subject areas are receiving different amounts of assessment instruction. Additionally, local edTPA data was examined to highlight areas of strength and weakness. Students did not perform significantly higher or lower on the assessment task as opposed to the other two tasks (planning and instruction), but there were significant differences among rubrics within the assessment task. A new theoretical framework is introduced to conceptualize the assessment education needed for secondary education teachers to be considered assessment literate

Vapor-liquid phase separator studies

A study of porous plug use for vapor-liquid phase seperation in spaceborne cryogenic systems was conducted. The three main topics addressed were: (1) the usefulness of porous media in designs that call for variable areas and flow rates; (2) the possibility of prediction of main parameters of porous plugs for a given material; and (3) prediction of all parameters of the plug, including secondary parameters

Experiments with metallic and ceramic porous media

Work in the area of mechano-caloric phenomena was initiated during 1988 with startup in the Summer 1988 period. The ideal system utilizing He-II super-phenomena is modeled readily, within the frame of thermodynamics energetics, using the concept of an ideal superleak. The real system however uses porous media of non-ideal pore-grain ingredients. The early phase of experimental and related modeling studies is outlined for the time period from Summer 1988 to the end of 1988

Thermal components for 1.8 K space cryogenics

Work of the summer 1986 is summarized in three areas. First, conceptual design of a laboratory system for heat exchanger evaluation in conjunction with the operation of a thermally activated fountain effect pump (FEP) is presented. Second, Knudsen effect evaluation of fine porous media useful for the pressurization plug which forms the main component of the FEP is described. Third, proof-of-principle test of the lab system selected on the basis of the evaluation is summarized