Abstracts - Earli

B 2328 August 2007 17:30 - 18:50Room: -1.63Paper SessionTechnology and innovationChair:Brigitte Rollett, University of Vienna, AustriaPrimary teachers’ concerns about implementing educational standards in Germany – associationswith student achievementHans Anand Pant, Humboldt-University Berlin, GermanyClaudia Pöhlmann, Humboldt-University Berlin, GermanyAs a consequence of the enactment of National Educational Standards (NES) for core schoolsubjects in 2003, all sixteen Federal States in Germany are bound to implement the NES throughstate law. Besides the development of NES-based national performance scales the NES documentsrecommend a system-wide implementation strategy, including streamlining of curricula and theimplementation and evaluation of standards-based classroom instruction. This study describeshow, at the early stages of a nationwide educational reform, primary school teachers are concernedwith this innovation and how their concerns are related to student achievement in their classes. Inorder to assess the level of primary teachers’ concerns we adopted the Stages of Concern (SoC)35-item questionnaire (Hall & Hord, 2006). The nationally representative sample of N=1,123primary school teachers of mathematics and German was part of a larger field trial evaluating thepsychometric properties of the NES-based proficiency scales in some 18,000 third- and fourthgradersin spring 2006. Data analyses include an evaluation of the reliability and construct validityof the SoC questionnaire, cluster analysis to detect homogenously profiled subgroups, and amultilevel analysis to test for effects of teachers’ SoC profile on student achievement. Clusteranalysis resulted in distinct SoC profile groups, and provisional analysis revealed that acombination of a high profile on personal concerns and a low profile on cooperation is associatedwith lower student achievement levels controlling for other student variables. Consequences arediscussed in terms of unfair "head start effects", as well as in terms of limitations arising from thehitherto correlational nature of the data.Fostering 6-8 year-old students’ inductive reasoningGyöngyvér Molnár, University of Szeged, HungaryThis paper presents a developmental training program of inductive reasoning for first and secondgrade students and the results of the first evaluation study. The training is based on Klauer’s theoryof inductive reasoning and the concept of the German program ‘Cognitive training for children’(Klauer, 1989). Klauer’s original program consists of 120 problems, which can be solved byinductive reasoning. Preserving the structural aspects of the tasks, the tools of the trainingexercises were significantly enhanced to correspond to the age of the cohort targeted. One-quarterof the tasks are manipulative (they need colorful building blocks, Dienes’s logical set, matches,etc.). In the experimental and control groups of the study 53 and 67 low-SES students wereinvolved, respectively. For the pre- and posttest of the study an inductive reasoning test was used,consisting of 33 figural, nonverbal items (Cronbach-a=0.86). On the average, the experimentalgroup outperformed the control group on the posttest significantly, by nearly two standarddeviations. The experimental group scored significantly higher on every ability for which training– 117 –