Differenzielles Lehren und Lernen: eine Kritik

Dieser Beitrag beschäftigt sich kritisch mit dem von Wolfgang Schöllhorn seit 1999 propagierten Ansatz des differenziellen Lehrens und Lernens. Nach einer Einordnung in die historische bewegungswissenschaftliche Debatte um den Informationsverarbeitungsansatz und die dynamische Systemtheorie zeigen wir, dass die von Schöllhorn behaupteten Praxiskonsequenzen theoretisch nicht fundiert sind, dass die Abgrenzung zu konkurrierenden Lerntheorien lücken- und fehlerhaft ausfällt, dass die präsentierte empirische Befundlage auf höchst wackeligen Füßen steht und dass der Ansatz sich auch aus Praxissicht als nicht tragfähig erweist. Mit Blick auf fatale Konsequenzen sowohl für die Sportpraxis als auch für die Sportwissenschaft empfehlen wir, in zukünftigen Publikationen zum differenziellen Lernen auf fehlerhafte und theoretisch wie empirisch unbegründete Praxisempfehlungen zu verzichten.

Kognitive Basisfunktionen und motorisch-koordinative Kompetenzen in Abhängigkeit des Peerstatus bei Kindern zu Beginn der Schulzeit

Zusammenfassung. In der vorliegenden Studie wird der Frage nachgegangen, ob sich zwischen beliebten, durchschnittlichen, unbeachteten und zurückgewiesenen Kindern Unterschiede in spezifischen kognitiven und motorischen Fähigkeiten finden lassen. Zu drei verschiedenen Zeitpunkten wurden mit 177 regulär eingeschulten 7-jährigen Kindern Peernominationen und Peerratings erhoben, um reliable soziometrische Daten zu erhalten und ein Vergleich der beiden Methoden vorzunehmen. Außerdem wurde eine umfassende Testbatterie von insgesamt 20 Aufgaben in den Bereichen Informationsverarbeitungsgeschwindigkeit, Kurzzeit- und Arbeitsgedächtnis, Inhibition, Sprache und Motorik durchgeführt. Mit Ausnahme der Kurzzeitgedächtniskapazität wurden für alle Funktionsbereiche signifikante Unterschiede zwischen den Statusgruppen gefunden. Die kontinuierlichen soziometrischen Werte der Ratingmethode zeigten sich etwas sensitiver als die der Nominationsmethode. Korrelativ wurde mit beiden Methoden ersichtlich, dass bessere Leistungen im kognitiven und motorischen Bereich nicht nur mit mehr Beliebtheit zusammenhingen, sondern auch, dass schlechte Leistungen in Verbindung standen mit sozialer Zurückweisung. Abstract. In the present study, it was investigated whether popular, average, neglected, and rejected children differ with respect to specific cognitive and motor skills. Peer nomination and peer rating methods were used at three different points in time to obtain reliable sociometric data of 177 regularly enrolled 7-year-old children and to compare the two methods. Furthermore, a battery comprising 21 tasks was used to assess speed of information processing, short-term and working memory, inhibition, language, and motor skills. Significant differences were found between children of different status groups with respect to all studied abilities with the exception of short-term memory. The continuous sociometric scores of the rating method resulted to be slightly more sensitive than those obtained with the nomination method. However, correlative analyses with both methods showed that better performance on the cognitive and motor tasks was associated with popularity, whereas worse performance was related to social rejection.

Modulation of anticipatory emotion and perception processing by cognitive control.

Strategies of cognitive control are helpful in reducing anxiety experienced during anticipation of unpleasant or potentially unpleasant events. We investigated the associated cerebral information processing underlying the use of a specific cognitive control strategy during the anticipation of affect-laden events. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we examined differential brain activity during anticipation of events of unknown and negative emotional valence in a group of eighteen healthy subjects that used a cognitive control strategy, similar to "reality checking" as used in psychotherapy, compared with a group of sixteen subjects that did not exert cognitive control. While expecting unpleasant stimuli, the "cognitive control" group showed higher activity in left medial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex areas but reduced activity in the left extended amygdala, pulvinar/lateral geniculate nucleus and fusiform gyrus. Cognitive control during the "unknown" expectation was associated with reduced amygdalar activity as well and further with reduced insular and thalamic activity. The amygdala activations associated with cognitive control correlated negatively with the reappraisal scores of an emotion regulation questionnaire. The results indicate that cognitive control of particularly unpleasant emotions is associated with elevated prefrontal cortex activity that may serve to attenuate emotion processing in for instance amygdala, and, notably, in perception related brain areas.

Individual group efficacy beliefs and performance motivation: A mediational approach

Introduction: According to the theoretical model of Cranach, Ochsenbein, and Valach (1986) understanding group actions needs consideration of aspects at both the group level and the level of individual members. For example individual action units constituting group actions are motivated at the individual level while potentially being affected by characteristics of the group. Theoretically, group efficacy beliefs could be a part of this motivational process as they are an individual’s cognitive contents about group-level abilities to perform well in a specific task. Positive relations between group level efficacy-beliefs and group performance have been reported and Bandura and Locke (2003) argue that this relationship is being mediated by motivational processes and goal setting. The aims of this study were a) to examine the effects of group characteristics on individual performance motivation and b) to test if those are mediated by individual group efficacy beliefs. Methods: Forty-seven students (M=22.83 years, SD=2.83, 34% women) of the university of Berne participated in this scenario based experiment. Data were collected on two collection points. Subjects were provided information about fictive team members with whom they had to perform a group triathlon. Three values (low, medium, high) of the other team members’ abilities to perform in their parts of the triathlon (swimming and biking respectively) were combined in a 3x3 full factorial design (Anderson, 1982) yielding nine groups. Subjects were asked how confident they were that the teams would perform well in the task (individual group efficacy beliefs), and to provide information about their motivation to perform at their best in the respective group contexts (performance motivation). Multilevel modeling (Mplus) was used to estimate the effects of the factors swim and bike, and the context-varying covariate individual group efficacy beliefs on performance motivation. Further analyses were undertaken to test if the effects of group contexts on performance motivation are mediated by individual group efficacy beliefs. Results: Significant effects were reported for both the group characteristics (βswim = 7.86; βbike = 8.57; both p < .001) and the individual group efficacy beliefs (βigeb; .40, p < .001) on performance motivation. The subsequent mediation model indicated that the effects of group characteristics on performance motivation were partly mediated by the individual group efficacy beliefs of the subjects with significant mediation effects for both factors swim and bike. Discussion/Conclusion: The results of the study provide further support for the motivational character of efficacy beliefs and point out a mechanism by which team characteristics influence performance relevant factors at the level of individual team members. The study indicates that high team abilities lead to augmented performance motivation, adding a psychological advantage to teams already high on task relevant abilities. Future investigations will be aiming at possibilities to keep individual performance motivation high in groups with low task relevant abilities. One possibility could be the formulation of individual task goals. References: Anderson, N. H. (1982). Methods of information integration theory. New York: Academic Press. Bandura, A. & Locke, E. A. (2003). Negative self-efficacy and goal effects revisited. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88, 87-99. Cranach, M. von, Ochsenbein, G. & Valach, L. (1986). The group as a self-active system: Outline of a theory of group action. European Journal of Social Psychology, 16, 193-229.

Increasing the career choice readiness of young adolescents: an evaluation study

A career workshop that applies models of the Cognitive Information Processing Approach (Sampson, Reardon, Peterson, & Lenz, 2004) and incorporates critical ingredients (Brown and Ryan Krane, 2000) to promote the career choice readiness of young adolescents was developed and evaluated with 334 Swiss students in seventh grade applying a Solomon four group design with a three-month follow-up. Participants significantly increased their performance in terms of career decidedness, career planning, career exploration, and vocational identity. Implications for evaluation research and counselling practice are presented.

Essays on behavioral aspects of the design and disclosure of compensation contracts

This thesis consists of four essays on the design and disclosure of compensation contracts. Essays 1, 2 and 3 focus on behavioral aspects of mandatory compensation disclosure rules and of contract negotiations in agency relationships. The three experimental studies develop psychology- based theory and present results that deviate from standard economic predictions. Furthermore, the results of Essay 1 and 2 also have implications for firms’ discretion in how to communicate their top management’s incentives to the capital market. Essay 4 analyzes the role of fairness perceptions for the evaluation of executive compensation. For this purpose, two surveys targeting representative eligible voters as well as investment professionals were conducted. Essay 1 investigates the role of the detailed ‘Compensation Discussion and Analysis’, which is part of the Security and Exchange Commission’s 2006 regulation, on investors’ evaluations of executive performance. Compensation disclosure complying with this regulation clarifies the relationship between realized reported compensation and the underlying performance measures and their target achievement levels. The experimental findings suggest that the salient presentation of executives’ incentives inherent in the ‘Compensation Discussion and Analysis’ makes investors’ performance evaluations less outcome dependent. Therefore, investors’ judgment and investment decisions might be less affected by noisy environmental factors that drive financial performance. The results also suggest that fairness perceptions of compensation contracts are essential for investors’ performance evaluations in that more transparent disclosure increases the perceived fairness of compensation and the performance evaluation of managers who are not responsible for a bad financial performance. These results have important practical implications as firms might choose to communicate their top management’s incentive compensation more transparently in order to benefit from less volatile expectations about their future performance. Similar to the first experiment, the experiment described in Essay 2 addresses the question of more transparent compensation disclosure. However, other than the first experiment, the second experiment does not analyze the effect of a more salient presentation of contract information but the informational effect of contract information itself. For this purpose, the experiment tests two conditions in which the assessment of the compensation contracts’ incentive compatibility, which determines executive effort, is either possible or not. On the one hand, the results suggest that the quality of investors’ expectations about executive effort is improved, but on the other hand investors might over-adjust their prior expectations about executive effort if being confronted with an unexpected financial performance and under-adjust if the financial performance confirms their prior expectations. Therefore, in the experiment, more transparent compensation disclosure does not lead to more correct overall judgments of executive effort and to even lower processing quality of outcome information. These results add to the literature on disclosure which predominantly advocates more transparency. The findings of the experiment however, identify decreased information processing quality as a relevant disclosure cost category. Firms might therefore carefully evaluate the additional costs and benefits of more transparent compensation disclosure. Together with the results from the experiment in Essay 1, the two experiments on compensation disclosure imply that firms should rather focus on their discretion how to present their compensation disclosure to benefit from investors’ improved fairness perceptions and their spill-over on performance evaluation. Essay 3 studies the behavioral effects of contextual factors in recruitment processes that do not affect the employer’s or the applicant’s bargaining power from a standard economic perspective. In particular, the experiment studies two common characteristics of recruitment processes: Pre-contractual competition among job applicants and job applicants’ non-binding effort announcements as they might be made during job interviews. Despite the standard economic irrelevance of these factors, the experiment develops theory regarding the behavioral effects on employees’ subsequent effort provision and the employers’ contract design choices. The experimental findings largely support the predictions. More specifically, the results suggest that firms can benefit from increased effort and, therefore, may generate higher profits. Further, firms may seize a larger share of the employment relationship’s profit by highlighting the competitive aspects of the recruitment process and by requiring applicants to make announcements about their future effort. Finally, Essay 4 studies the role of fairness perceptions for the public evaluation of executive compensation. Although economic criteria for the design of incentive compensation generally do not make restrictive recommendations with regard to the amount of compensation, fairness perceptions might be relevant from the perspective of firms and standard setters. This is because behavioral theory has identified fairness as an important determinant of individuals’ judgment and decisions. However, although fairness concerns about executive compensation are often stated in the popular media and even in the literature, evidence on the meaning of fairness in the context of executive compensation is scarce and ambiguous. In order to inform practitioners and standard setters whether fairness concerns are exclusive to non-professionals or relevant for investment professionals as well, the two surveys presented in Essay 4 aim to find commonalities in the opinions of representative eligible voters and investments professionals. The results suggest that fairness is an important criterion for both groups. Especially, exposure to risk in the form of the variable compensation share is an important criterion shared by both groups. The higher the assumed variable share, the higher is the compensation amount to be perceived as fair. However, to a large extent, opinions on executive compensation depend on personality characteristics, and to some extent, investment professionals’ perceptions deviate systematically from those of non-professionals. The findings imply that firms might benefit from emphasizing the riskiness of their managers’ variable pay components and, therefore, the findings are also in line with those of Essay 1.

Does upward social mobility increase life satisfaction? A longitudinal analysis using British and Swiss panel data

A main assumption of social production function theory is that status is a major determinant of subjective well-being (SWB). From the perspective of the dissociative hypothesis, however, upward social mobility may be linked to identity problems, distress, and reduced levels of SWB because upwardly mobile people lose their ties to their class of origin. In this paper, we examine whether or not one of these arguments holds. We employ the United Kingdom and Switzerland as case studies because both are linked to distinct notions regarding social inequality and upward mobility. Longitudinal multilevel analyses based on panel data (UK: BHPS, Switzerland: SHP) allow us to reconstruct individual trajectories of life satisfaction (as a cognitive component of SWB) along with events of intragenerational and intergenerational upward mobility—taking into account previous levels of life satisfaction, dynamic class membership, and well-studied determinants of SWB. Our results show some evidence for effects of social class and social mobility on well-being in the UK sample, while there are no such effects in the Swiss sample. The UK findings support the idea of dissociative effects in terms of a negative effect of intergenerational upward mobility on SWB.