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The scientific transfer project of the research program “KoKoHs: Modeling and Measuring Competencies in Higher Education – Validation and Methodological Innovations” cordially invites you to our international conference on September 12-13, 2019, at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.
At the conference, the main results of the KoKoHs program will be presented and critically discussed with world-renowned international experts. We aim to encourage debates on the practical use of developed models and instruments as well as on conceptional and methodological innovation in competency assessment. One focus will be on national and international perspectives on transferring the validated test instruments into practice. We provide an outlook on the next working phase, in which the KoKoHs competence measurement instruments will be transferred into university practice.
The conference will take place on September 12-13, 2019, starting at 10:00 AM at the Helmholtz Institute at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.
Participation in the conference is free of charge, and registration is possible until September 2, 2019, by sending us a brief e-mail: info@kompetenzen-im-hochschulsektor.de
For further information, please see our conference program attached.
We are looking forward to your attendance.
Klein, P., Küchemann, S., Brückner, S., Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, O., & Kuhn, J. (2019). Student understanding of graph slope and area under a curve: A replication study comparing first-year physics and economics students. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 15(2), 1-17.
https://journals.aps.org/prper/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.15.020116
Abstract:
In this eye-tracking study, we compared graph comprehension between economics and physics students. The findings broadly confirm that both groups of students have the same visit duration on the graphs, consequently proving total dwell time to be an inadequate predictor of performance. We identify that attention on concept-specific areas of interest within the graphs discriminates the correct from the incorrect performers. Furthermore, we analyzed the confidence level of the two student groups and found that physics students have a higher ability to correctly judge their own performance compared to economics students. Overall, our results highlight the importance of an instructional adjustment towards a more mathematical- and graphical-based education.
Jeschke, C., Kuhn, C., Lindmeier, A., Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, O., Saas, H. & Heinze, A. (2019). What is the Relationship Between Knowledge in Mathematics and Knowledge in Economics? Investigating the professional knowledge of (pre-service) teachers trained in two subjects. Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 4, 511-524. https://dx.doi.org/10.3262/ZP1904511
Abstract:
Content knowledge (CK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) are considered key aspects of teacher competence. Although teacher education and training programs across disciplines focus on the development of CK and PCK, there is little evidence of whether teachers trained in two subjects benefit from reciprocal effects between knowledge in these subjects. To approach this question, we investigated the correlation between the CK and PCK in mathematics and economics of N = 96 pre- and in-service teachers trained in both subjects. We found a substantial correlation between CK and PCK within a subject and between corresponding knowledge components across subjects, with CK in mathematics related also to PCK in economics. We found that although teachers’ professional knowledge structure mirrored domains, CK in mathematics could be useful for teaching economics.
The Chair for Business and Economics Education of Prof. Dr. Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia will be represented again this year with several presentations and symposia at the following international conferences: 18th Biennial EARLI Conference (12-16 August 2019, Aachen), WERA 2019 Focal Meeting (05-08 August 2019, Tokyo) as well as at the Annual Conference of the Section Vocational and Business Education (BWP) (25-27 September 2019, Graz). Please refer to the respective conference program for
further details.
Dr. Roland Happ has held a Visiting Professorship at the Mori Arinori Institute for Higher Education and Global Mobility of Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo (Japan) since April 2019. This position supports further intensive cooperation with the Japanese institute.
International conference of the SUCCESS project and corresponding transfer workshop
In the context of the research project "SUCCESS - Study Success and Study Opportunities for Refugees" the chair under Professor Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia hosted an international conference and corresponding transfer workshop from December 4 -6, 2019 at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. At the international conference "Digital Approaches to Increasing Equity in Higher Education - Opening Universities for Refugees", the current, globally leading projects and findings on the successful university integration of refugees were presented and critically discussed.
Further information on the events, their programmes and the SUCCESS project can be retrieved from the project website by following the link https://success-eng.uni-mainz.de/events/.
Lecture series on “Challenges through Populism” at JGU – Answers from business and economics education
Dr. Christiane Kuhn and Dr. Sebastian Brückner (Department of Business and Economics Education) were invited to present the perspective of business and economics education in the lecture series "Challenges through Populism" at JGU. In their lecture entitled "Fact or Fake - Significance and Implications for Educational Processes in the Context of Digitalization" on 29 October 2019, they demonstrated on an evidence-based basis the explosive nature of assessing pupils and students in their competence to critically use and evaluate information, and the necessity to promote it at an early stage. Actively fostering this competence to counteract the arbitrary use of media during instruction represents a central challenge and requires its diagnosis.
International KoKoHs Conference, September 11-13, 2019, Mainz
On September 11 - 13 2019, the international conference of the research program “Models and Instruments for the Assessment of Competencies in Higher Education – Validation and Methodological Innovations” (KoKoHs), which is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), was hosted by Prof. Dr. Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia and Prof. Dr. Hans Anand Pant at the Helmholtz Institute at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Participants comprised around 70 members of the research projects as well as other researchers and practitioners from higher education. The aim of the conference was to present central research results as well as to critically reflect on possibilities for transfer into practice, based on exchange with renowned international experts. For more information, please visit: https://www.kompetenzen-im-hochschulsektor.de/veranstaltungen/
Lecture for Chinese delegation
Prof. Dr. Klaus Beck and Dr. Roland Happ (Chair of Business and Economic Education Prof. Dr. Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia) gave a lecture on behalf of the Federal Association for Economic Development and Foreign Trade in Mainz on 4 September 2019 in front of a delegation of 20 university professors from the Guangdong Agriculture Industry Business Polytechnic College in China. The topic of the lecture was the economic knowledge of German and Chinese students.
PLATO: International Conference 2019
The International PLATO Conference took place at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, on 13-14 September 2019. The conference focused on the latest research results on digital learning in higher education. New findings from computer science, communication science, linguistics, education, psychology and from different interdisciplinary studies on students’ use of digital media over their course of study were presented. For example, it was shown that media use differs significantly between students in economics, social sciences, physics, and medicine, and it correlates with both positive and negative effects on the acquisition of domain-specific knowledge over the course of higher education studies. Moreover, the program included numerous keynotes and critical discussions by excellent international researchers. A stimulating exchange throughout the conference strengthened the synergies between the PLATO researchers and the participating experts.
Contact: plato@uni-mainz.de
The interdisciplinary collaborative research program "Positive Learning in the Age of Information" (PLATO) has been granted funding by the German federal state Rhineland-Palatinate, starting in June 2019, and is receiving additional funding from the RMU Fund. For further information on PLATO, visit our website.
01.07.2019: Chair of Business and Economics Education receives funding to promote teacher training in vocational education
The proposal for “Technology and Business: Integrated Education (TWIND)”, submitted by the Chair of Business and Economic Education and its partners, was positively evaluated in the Teacher Training Quality Campaign funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
Over the next four years, JGU will receive EUR 1.2 million to develop digital teaching-learning tools to support an effective training of prospective teachers in vocational education. The collaborative project of JGU Mainz, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Universität Kassel und Pädagogische Hochschule Schwäbisch Gmünd receives EUR 2.4 million. The TWIND project aims to interlink economic, technical and general education didactics.
Contact:
Dr. Christiane Kuhn
e-mail: christiane.kuhn@uni-mainz.de
PLATO has been granted funding from the initiative fund of the Rhine-Main Universities (RMU). The RMU funding will be used to consolidate pilot studies and prepare a cross-university application to solidify PLATO collaboration structures (for more information, see RMU-Website).
Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, O., Kuhn, C., Brückner, S. & Leighton, J. P. (2019). Evaluating a technology-based assessment (TBA) to measure teachers’ action-related and reflective skills. International Journal of Testing (IJT), 19(2), 148–171. https://doi.org/10.1080/15305058.2019.1586377
Abstract:
Teaching performance can be assessed validly only if the assessment involves an appropriate, authentic representation of real-life teaching practices. Different skills interact in coordinating teachers’ actions in different classroom situations. Based on the evidence-centered design model, we developed a technology-based assessment framework that enables differentiation between two essential teaching actions: action-related skills and reflective skills. Action-related skills are necessary to handle specific subject-related situations during instruction. Reflective skills are necessary to prepare and evaluate specific situations in pre- and postinstructional phases. In this article, we present the newly developed technology-based assessment to validly measure teaching performance, and we discuss validity evidence from cognitive interviews with teachers (novices and experts) using the think-aloud method, which indicates that the test takers’ respective mental processes when solving action-related skills tasks are consistent with the theoretically assumed knowledge and skill components and depend on the different levels of teaching expertise.
ELMaWi transfer workshop
On 3 May 2019, at the invitation of the Chair of Business and Economics Education (Dr. Christiane Kuhn, Prof. Dr. Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, and Hannes Saas), a lively exchange took place at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz between representatives of university and practice for the implementation of competence orientation in teacher training. Groundbreaking possibilities for optimizing teacher training in line with practical needs in the 21st century and preparing prospective teachers for the complex demands of teaching at an early stage were presented and discussed. Further information can be found on the homepage of the BMBF-funded ELMaWi project: https://www.elmawi.de/transfer-in-die-praxis/
International Conference with Transfer Workshop from 04-06, December 2019 at Humboldt University Berlin
We are pleased to announce that we are holding an International Conference and Transfer Workshop for our collaborative project SUCCESS – Study Success and Study Opportunities for Refugees at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, from December 4-6, 2019.
The title of the conference is: Digital Approaches to Increasing Equity in Higher Education – Opening Universities for Refugees
We will be discussing opportunities for refugees in higher education with a particular focus on the provision of digital education. It will be explored whether existing online educational offers actually facilitate the integration of prospective students with a flight background into their host country – including regular universities – and how refugees can be more successfully integrated into higher education.
We would be delighted to have you participate and kindly ask you to register by sending us an e-mail to success@uni-mainz.de
We are looking forward to seeing you at our conference in Berlin and to exchanging ideas with you!
Kind regards,
Prof. Dr. Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia and the SUCCESS team
Jeschke, C., Kuhn, C., Lindmeier, A., Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, O., Saas, H. & Heinze, A. (2019). Performance assessment to investigate the domain-specificity of instructional skills among pre-service and in-service teachers of mathematics and economics. British Journal of Educational Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12277
Abstract:
Key elements of instructional quality include the teacher's ability to immediately react in domain‐specific classroom situations. Such skills – defined as action‐related skills – can only be validly assessed using authentic representations of real‐life teaching practice. However, research has not yet explained how teachers apply domain‐specific knowledge for teaching and to what extent action‐related skills are transferable from one domain to another. Our study aims to examine (1) the relationship between action‐related skills, content knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge, and (2) the domain specificity of action‐related skills of (prospective) teachers in the two domains of mathematics and economics. We examined German pre‐service and in‐service teachers of mathematics (N = 239) and economics (N = 321), including n = 96 (prospective) teachers who teach both subjects. Action‐related skills in mathematics and economics were measured using video‐based performance assessments. Content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge were assessed using established paper–pencil tests. Correlation analyses, linear regressions, and a path model were applied. In mathematics and economics, we find a similar pattern of moderate correlations between action‐related skills, content knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge. Moreover, a significant correlation between action‐related skills in mathematics and economics can be explained almost entirely by underlying relations between content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge in both domains. Our findings suggest that action‐related skills empirically differ from domain‐specific knowledge and should be considered as domain‐specific constructs. This indicates that teacher education should not only focus on domain‐specific teacher knowledge, but may also provide learning opportunities for action‐related skills in each domain.
On May 3, 2019, at the invitation of the Chair of Business and Economics Education (Prof. Dr. Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, Dr. Christiane Kuhn and Hannes Saas), a lively exchange between representatives of universities, state seminars for teaching and schools for the practical implementation of competence orientation in teacher training took place at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. In addition to central findings on the measurement and promotion of subject-specific instruction skills among (prospective) teachers of mathematics and economics from the BMBF-funded ELMaWi project, groundbreaking possibilities were presented and discussed for optimizing teacher training in line with practical needs in the 21st century and preparing prospective teachers for the complex demands of teaching at an early stage. Further information can be found on the homepage of the BMBF-funded ELMaWi Project.
Our colleague Klaus Breuer passed away very unexpectedly on the 9th of June 2018. In him we have lost a driven, productive, creative, and approachable colleague, with whom we were personally obliged in the many years of his work in the economic education of our students, research, and in academic self-government.Klaus Breuer promoted the interdisciplinary and international dialogue in the research of economic education from very early on and reified this work in collaborative projects – most recently in the area of financial literacy, where he succeeded in founding and coordinating the new international research network “International Research Network on Financial Literacy as a 21st Century Skill – Cross Cultural Approaches to Research” as part of the World Education Research Association (WERA).
Likewise, the promotion of young scientific researchers was always a matter of particular importance. Under his primary and secondary advising, over a dozen dissertations were written, of which many were distinguished with research prizes.
Even after his retirement, he stayed connected with the university and his faculty and remained interested in their constitution and further development. In this way, we keep him in living memory.
Klaus Beck
Olga Troitschanskaia
Christian Dormann