Embedding R in the Mediawiki

Teaching statistics to students in our area of economics and educational science often brings about the problem that students have either forgottentheir statistical knowledge, or have taken different classes than the ones we offer in basic statistics. We therefore need some kind of statistical dictionary where we, as teachers, can refer to a common base and where students can look up specific terms. The Wikipedia - a general online encyclopaedia - compelled us to use a wiki for our dictionary. While the Wikipedia contains a large number of statistical terms, these are often too long and detailed to be visual displayed in lectures very well and some more specific terms are not included.R, wiki, Mediawiki

Wirtschaftspädagogisches Studium an der Uni Mainz. Ein polyvalenter Bachelor und Master of Science in Wirtschaftspädagogik

Die Autoren betrachten den 2007 akkreditierten Bachelor- und Masterstudiengang Wirtschaftspädagogik, der zum Wintersemester 2007/08 bzw. zum Wintersemester 2009/10 an der Universität Mainz eingeführt wurde und der zu den ersten großen Studiengängen der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität gehört, die nach dem Bologna-Modell umgestellt wurden. Nach einigen Vorbemerkungen zur Implementierung des Studiengangs führen sie a) die Ziele des Bachelor- und Masterstudiums Wirtschaftspädagogik, b) die Leitideen der Mainzer Wirtschaftspädagogik sowie c) die Struktur der neuen wirtschaftpädagogischen Studiengänge (für den Bachelor of Science sowie den Master of Science) aus. (DIPF/ ssch

Assessing the Quality of the Bachelor Degree Courses: An Analysis of their Effects on Students' Acquisition of Economic Content Knowledge

Quality development in higher education (HE) relies on the assessment, evaluation, and optimisation of university teaching. Only a few studies have evaluated the new bachelor (BA) and master (MA) degree courses in Germany based on an objective measurement of key performance indicators, such as students' knowledge acquisition. To address this research deficit, students' content knowledge of business and economic (b&e) was assessed in a longitudinal study. Results of students in the BA/MA study model were compared to those of students in the former Diplom study model while many potential structural and personal influence factors were controlled. This paper presents in detail the findings and discusses their implications for quality assurance and performance assessment in HE. 21.03.2014 | Roland Happ & Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia (Mainz

Validation of newly developed tasks for the assessment of generic Critical Online Reasoning (COR) of university students and graduates

In recent decades, the acquisition of information has evolved substantially and fundamentally affects students’ use of information, so that the Internet has become one of the most important sources of information for learning. However, learning with freely accessible online resources also poses challenges, such as vast amounts of partially unstructured, untrustworthy, or biased information. To successfully learn by using the Internet, students therefore require specific skills for selecting, processing, and evaluating the online information, e.g., to distinguish trustworthy from distorted or biased information and for judging its relevance with regard to the topic and task at hand. Despite the central importance of these skills, their assessment in higher education is still an emerging field. In this paper, we present the newly defined theoretical-conceptual framework Critical Online Reasoning (COR). Based on this framework, a corresponding performance assessment, Critical Online Reasoning Assessment (CORA), was newly developed and underwent first steps of validation in accordance with the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. We first provide an overview of the previous validation results and then expand them by including further analyses of the validity aspects “internal test structure” and “relations with other variables”. To investigate the internal test structure, we conducted variance component analyses based on the generalizability theory with a sample of 125 students and investigated the relations with other variables by means of correlation analyses. The results show correlations with external criteria as expected and confirm that the CORA scores reflect the different test performances of the participants and are not significantly biased by modalities of the assessment. With these new analyses, this study substantially contributes to previous research by providing comprehensive evidence for the validity of this new performance assessment that validly assesses the complex multifaceted construct of critical online reasoning among university students and graduates. CORA results provide unique insights into the interplay between features of online information acquisition and processing, learning environments, and the cognitive and metacognitive requirements for critically reasoning from online information in university students and young professionals

Modeling and Measuring Domain-Specific Quantitative Reasoning in Higher Education Business and Economics

Quantitative reasoning is considered a crucial prerequisite for acquiring domain-specific expertise in higher education. To ascertain whether students are developing quantitative reasoning, validly assessing its development over the course of their studies is required. However, when measuring quantitative reasoning in an academic study program, it is often confounded with other skills. Following a situated approach, we focus on quantitative reasoning in the domain of business and economics and define domain-specific quantitative reasoning primarily as a skill and capacity that allows for reasoned thinking regarding numbers, arithmetic operations, graph analyses, and patterns in real-world business and economics tasks, leading to problem solving. As many studies demonstrate, well-established instruments for assessing business and economics knowledge like the Test of Understanding College Economics (TUCE) and the Examen General para el Egreso de la Licenciatura (EGEL) contain items that require domain-specific quantitative reasoning skills. In this study, we follow a new approach and assume that assessing business and economics knowledge offers the opportunity to extract domain-specific quantitative reasoning as the skill for handling quantitative data in domain-specific tasks. We present an approach where quantitative reasoning – embedded in existing measurements from TUCE and EGEL tasks – will be empirically extracted. Hereby, we reveal that items tapping domain-specific quantitative reasoning constitute an empirically separable factor within a Confirmatory Factor Analysis and that this factor (domain-specific quantitative reasoning) can be validly and reliably measured using existing knowledge assessments. This novel methodological approach, which is based on obtaining information on students’ quantitative reasoning skills using existing domain-specific tests, offers a practical alternative to broad test batteries for assessing students’ learning outcomes in higher education

How Gender and Primary Language Influence the Acquisition of Economic Knowledge of Secondary School Students in the United States and Germany

Economics has become an essential component of secondary school curricula in many countries as a result of the growing awareness that young adults need fundamental economic knowledge to manage their personal finances. Accordingly, an increasing number of comparative studies are being conducted of commonalities and differences in students’ economic knowledge and its most decisive influencing factors within and across countries. In this study, we compare the performance of secondary school students in the United States (N = 3517) and Germany (N = 983) on the fourth version of the Test of Economic Literacy. We investigate two personal characteristics that have been found to influence the students’ acquisition of economic knowledge: gender and primary language. Although these two characteristics have been considered in numerous studies of economic education in both countries, they have not been investigated together in an international comparison, which would allow more effective pedagogical approaches for economic education to be formulated. We found male students in both countries exhibited greater economic knowledge, and students whose primary language was the same as the national language performed better. We discuss implications for economic education in both countries and cross-nationally

A new approach to analyzing the development of domain-specific knowledge among undergraduate medical students using learning scores

Medicine is one of the domains in higher education with the highest demands [1] . The importance of acquiring domain-specific knowledge to understand the scientific rationales of practical work in medicine is considered vital [2] , about the specific responsibilities associated with medical professions. Teachers in medicine are faced with specific instructional challenges, for instance, being required to teach and examine several hundred students with heterogeneous educational backgrounds and study preconditions [3] . Consequently, in medical education practice, Multiple-Choice (MC) tests are often used in examinations because of their high level of efficiency and practicability, and despite their well-known disadvantages such as construct-irrelevant bias and low levels of explanatory power [4, 5] . In particular, the extent to which teaching contributes to the development of domain-specific knowledge cannot be measured by simple post-testing with MC tests and analyzing test sum scores only [6, 7] . Thus, practical implications for teaching and learning in medicine can only be derived to a very limited extent. In this paper, we present a new approach to analyzing the development of medical knowledge and suggest that a design with pre- and post-measurements and the consideration of decomposed pre- and posttest scores, which we define as learning scores, can provide substantial additional information on medical students’ learning over the course of their studies. This practicable approach can help to inform educational practitioners about students’ difficulties in learning and understanding certain medical contents, as well as to uncover possible student misconceptions about medical concepts and models