Learning from errors: effects of teachers training on studentsâ attitudes towards and their individual use of errors

Constructive error handling is considered an important factor for individual learning processes. In a quasi-experimental study with Grades 6 to 9 students, we investigate effects on students’ attitudes towards errors as learning opportunities in two conditions: an error-tolerant classroom culture, and the first condition along with additional teaching of strategies for analyzing errors. Our findings show positive effects of the error-tolerant classroom culture on the affective level, whereas students are not influenced by the cognitive support. There is no evidence for differential effects for student groups with different attitudes towards errors

Globalization and Modern Identity Practices - Locals and Cosmopolitans in Seventeenth Century Amsterdam

This paper offers a historical analysis of cultural identification among locals and cosmopolitans in Amsterdam, the centre of the seventeenth century world system. Here, the convergence of global processes and local changes, such as increasing monetization, commodification and anonymization of everyday lives generated conditions that contributed to the formation of modern individual and group identities. Early modern globalization gave rise to a “global animus” in Amsterdam and it prompted the city’s political elites to promote a cosmopolitan civic identity, expressed in allegoric art and architecture. On a theoretical level this paper criticizes objectifying or essentializing approaches to cultural globalization and to cultural identity and highlights instead the contradictions and ambiguities involved in the processes of attributing cultural meaning. A discussion of the poetry of Jacob Cats (1577–1660) reveals how local actors attributed contesting cultural meanings to the objects of global trade and how they acculturated them in different ways into their practices of local or cosmopolitan identification

The Role of General and Subject-specific Language Skills when Learning Mathematics in Elementary School

The role of skills in the language of instruction for mathematics learning is well established by longitudinal studies at the primary school level. Explanations for these relations lead to the question: are they mostly due to general, domain-overarching language skills, or does the command of subject-specific language registers play an important role? Integrating prior research threads, we propose two instruments to measure subject-specific language skills in mathematics: One measuring mathematical vocabulary, and one measuring mathematical text comprehension. We report on a longitudinal study with N = 237 German grade 3 students, which investigated the predictive value of these instruments beyond prior arithmetic skills, general language skills, and control variables such as general cognitive skills and socio-economic status on students’ later arithmetic skills. We applied a multidimensional assessment model to measure arithmetic skills. Apart from replicating the prominent role of general language skills found in earlier studies, our results indicate a substantial, additional role of subject-specific language skills for the development of mathematics skills. These relations could be identified for knowledge of mathematical vocabulary, as well as for mathematical text comprehension. The results indicate that fostering subject-specific language skills already at the primary school level is not only one of many goals of mathematics instruction, but is a core prerequisite to supporting mathematical skill acquisition

The (Un)availability of Human Activities for Social Intervention: Reflecting on Social Mechanisms in Technology Assessment and Sustainable Development Research

This article considers human activities as a central but deeply problematic aspect of sustainability. We argue that radical reduction in human activities could be an important lever to counter problems such as climate change. However, instead of pursuing a normative hypothesis that human activities ought to be subjected to specific kinds of sustainability measures, we pursue the hypothesis that human activities are largely unavailable for sustainability measures, because as an aggregated global phenomenon they are subject to social mechanisms, which accelerate rather than slow down activities. While social mechanisms are human inventions that render (inter)actions unlikely likely in the first place, they have evolved towards structural and historical embeddedness, which makes them unavailable for any instrumentalized design. The question is, how can we, experts in technology assessment, recognize social mechanisms in strategies to reduce human activities and to achieve a transformative impact on systemic reproduction. Our discussion centers on technical, psychological, and communicative social mechanisms of reproduction, and experiments with ideas of how to utilize social mechanisms and the (un)availability of human activities in technology assessment and sustainable development research