0000000000185838
AUTHOR
Klaus Beck
Performance Assessment of Generic and Domain-Specific Skills in Higher Education Economics
Following criticisms by employers about academic graduates’ lack of 21st century skills, students need to develop skills such as professional knowledge, critical thinking and problem solving. Accordingly, there is a demand for suitable assessments of these skills. One approach is to develop a performance assessment using tasks adapted from real-world decision-making and judgment situations that students and graduates have to face in academic and professional domains. Such tasks employ real-life scenarios and require generic and domain-specific skills in different facets to handle a given problem adequately. In this paper, we present a newly developed performance assessment that aims to meas…
Ensuring content validity of psychological and educational tests – the role of experts
Many test developers try to ensure the content validity of their tests by having external experts review the items in terms of relevance, difficulty, clarity, and so on. Although this approach is widely accepted, a closer look reveals there are several pitfalls that need to be avoided if experts’ advice is to be truly helpful. First, I offer a classification of tasks experts are given by test developers as reported on in the literature dealing with procedures of drawing on experts’ advice. Second, I review a sample of reports on test development (N = 72) to identify the common current procedures for selecting and consulting experts. Results indicate that often the choice of experts seems to…
Professional Role Requirements and Universal Morals
The enduring commercial and financial crisis that originated in the US and flashed over to Europe in 2008 raises a lot of serious questions not only about economic interrelations between nations but also on the behavior of political actors and financial managers in banks, hedge funds and other comparable enterprises.
„Beruflichkeit“ als wirtschaftspädagogisches Konzept
Der Begriff „Beruflichkeit“ erfahrt in der Literatur hochst unterschiedliche Bedeutungszuweisungen, ohne dass immer klar ware, worauf er sich bezieht. Der vorliegende Beitrag unterbreitet einen Vorschlag, der ihn – im Rekurs auf einen padagogischen Berufsbegriff – als Konstrukt zur Bezeichnung tatigkeitsbezogener Metakognitionen ausweist. Damit lasst er sich als das personale Pendant zu den metafunktionalen Strukturparametern der arbeitsteilig organisierten Gesellschaft etablieren und erhalt so einen systematisch bestimmten terminologischen Ort. Als mehrdimensionales Konstrukt verweist ein solcher Beruflichkeitsbegriff auf bislang wenig beforschte Facetten des individuellen tatigkeitsbezoge…
On the complementarity of holistic and analytic approaches to performance assessment scoring.
BACKGROUND A holistic approach to performance assessment recognizes the theoretical complexity of multifaceted critical thinking (CT), a key objective of higher education. However, issues related to reliability, interpretation, and use arise with this approach. AIMS AND METHOD Therefore, we take an analytic approach to scoring students' written responses on a performance assessment. We focus on the complementarity of holistic and analytic approaches and on whether theoretically developed analytical scoring rubrics can produce sub-scores that may measure the 'whole' performance in a holistic assessment. SAMPLE We use data from the Wind Turbines performance assessment, developed in the iPAL p…
Vocational training and moral judgement
Abstract Since Carol Gilligan (1982) presented her conception of “two morals”, several empirical studies have been carried out to verify her assumption that the moral reasoning of men and women generally follows different principles. These research findings led to an examination of gender-specific traits in a sample of insurance apprentices. The data suggest that Gilligan’s assumption cannot be upheld although the detailed analysis of moral reasoning and the conditions of its development seem to be gender-biased. Gender differences in moral judgments should not be dealt with as a matter of the quality of moral reasoning (“different voice-hypothesis”), but rather as a matter of perceiving so…
Berufserziehung als lebenslange Aufgabe Vocational education as a lifelong learning task
VonBerafsinhabern aller Couleurverlangtmanheuteuber die herkommlichen QualifikationenhinausEigenschaften, dieihre Tuchtigkeitauchunterdenveranderten Bedingungen dermodernen Arbeitswelt sichern sollen. Flexibilitay, Mobilitat, Innovationsbereitschaft, Kundenorientierung, Selbstmanagement sind einige der Chiffren, mit denen die „neuen“ Kompetenzen auf den Begriff gebracht (vgl. Hoff/Ewers/Petersen 2004) undin einem angereicherten Professionalitatskonzeptaufgehobenwerdensollen. PersonlichkeitsmerkmalediesesTyps habenzweifellosenormanBedeutunggewonnen,einerseitsindenStrategiender personalwirtschaftlichen Beurteilung und Auswahl von Bewerbern bei der Besetzung von freien Arbeitsplatzen, bei Befo…
On the Relationship Between “Education” and “Critical Thinking”
In view of recent international efforts to identify and measure the ability “critical thinking,” this paper attempts to trace and reconstruct the core meaning of this concept in the light of its conceptual history in the German terminology of educational philosophy and research. In doing so, it becomes evident that it is necessary to clarify the relationship between “critical thinking” and “education,” both understood as terms designating a mental state. In German as well as in English educational research, it seems to be the prevailing view that “critical thinking” is a partial meaning, a facet, of “education” (in the sense of “being well educated”). The German language, however, different…
Assessment of University Students’ Critical Thinking: Next Generation Performance Assessment
Following employers’ criticisms and recent societal developments, policymakers and educators have called for students to develop a range of generic skills such as critical thinking (“twenty-first c...