Abstracts - Earli

assessment cycles. Attempts to explain differences between countries or subpopulations arelimited by the survey design of these studies. On the other hand, the design of PISA can beextended by national options. This opportunity has been widely used in PISA 2003 by the nationalproject managers in Germany: In a follow-up study all the students and an additional sample oftwo classes from each school had been tested again in 2004. The aim of the study was to testexplanations models for the development of math and science competencies under classroomconditions. All the students in this sample had completed additional (national) math and scienceassessments. Also the parents of the students and their mathematics teachers had to fill inquestionnaires. The design of this study allowed multi-level-analysis. The papers presents some ofthe findings from this study which show that extended large scale assessments can help to interpretinternational comparisons, and, at the same time, can contribute significantly to educationalresearch.On the way to causal Inferences: teacher knowledge, teaching, and student progress within theframework of PISAJürgen Baumert, MPI, Berlin, GermanyThis presentation describes the longitudinal extension to PISA 2003 in Germany, which included astudy of mathematics teachers’ content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge and howthese knowledge components relate to high-quality instruction. The structure of mathematicsteachers’ professional knowledge will be analyzed, and structural equation modelling will be usedto test the extent to which these knowledge components predict the quality of mathematicsinstruction and students’ learning gains.A 428 August 2007 15:00 - 17:00Room: -1.63SymposiumWhy constructivist teaching does not workChair: Jeroen van Merriënboer, Open University of the Netherlands, NetherlandsOrganiser: John Sweller, University of New South Wales, AustraliaOrganiser: Richard Clark, University of Southern California, USAOrganiser: Paul Ayres, University of New South Wales, AustraliaOrganiser: Paul Kirschner, University of Utrecht, NetherlandsDiscussant: Alexander Renkl, University of Freiburg, GermanyThe last half century has seen a considerable emphasis on minimising guidance during teachingwith the use of discovery learning or constructivist teaching techniques gaining prominence. Thepopularity of these techniques has been maintained despite a near total lack of supportingempirical evidence based on randomised, controlled experiments. Instead, the empirical evidencealmost uniformly supports a heavy emphasis on instructional guidance. Furthermore, most currentconceptions of human cognitive architecture and the epistemology of learning and teaching eitherexplicitly or implicitly reject the notion of learners discovering knowledge with minimalinstructional assistance. The four presentations of this symposium explore the various empirical,cognitive and epistemological issues associated with this debate.– 14 –