Publications

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dc.contributor.author: Atik, Didem; Nickolaus, Reinhold

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dc.contributor.author: Schölzel, Christian

Ausgehend vom Erwartungs-Wert-Modell von Eccles et al. (1983) wird der Frage nachgegangen, ob Leistungserwartungen von Eltern und Lehrpersonen sowie Leistungen in Deutsch und Mathematik in der Primarschule die Bildungsverläufe (Gymnasium vs. Berufsausbildung) beim Übertritt in die Sekundarstufe II erklären. Die Längsschnittstichprobe umfasst Daten aus dem 5. und 9. Schuljahr von N= 290 Schülerinnen und Schülern aus vier Kantonen der Deutschschweiz sowie die zugehörigen Angaben zu Leistungserwartungen von Eltern und Lehrpersonen. Mittels stufenweisen logistischen Regressionsanalysen und Mediationsanalysen kann gezeigt werden, dass sowohl die Leistungen der Kinder als auch die Leistungserwartungen der Eltern und Lehrpersonen in Deutsch und Mathematik die Bildungsentscheidung am Ende der obligatorischen Schulzeit vorhersagen. Der direkte Effekt der Leistungen wird partiell durch die fachspezifischen Leistungserwartungen mediiert. Abschließend werden die Befunde bezüglich der Rolle von Eltern- und Lehrererwartungen im frühen schulischen Kontext diskutiert und mit dem meritokratischen Anspruchsprinzip konfrontiert.

Stress is proven to have detrimental effects on physical and mental health. Due to different tasks and study designs, the direct consequences of acute stress have been found to be wide-reaching: while some studies report prosocial effects, others report increases in antisocial behavior, still others report no effect. To control for specific effects of different stressors and to consider the role of social anxiety in stress-related social behavior, we investigated the effects of social versus physical stress on behavior in male participants possessing different levels of social anxiety. In a randomized, controlled two by two design we investigated the impact of social and physical stress on behavior in healthy young men. We found significant influences on various subjective increases in stress by physical and social stress, but no interaction effect. Cortisol was significantly increased by physical stress, and the heart rate was modulated by physical and social stress as well as their combination. Social anxiety modulated the subjective stress response but not the cortisol or heart rate response. With respect to behavior, our results show that social and physical stress interacted to modulate trust, trustworthiness, and sharing. While social stress and physical stress alone reduced prosocial behavior, a combination of the two stressor modalities could restore prosociality. Social stress alone reduced nonsocial risk behavior regardless of physical stress. Social anxiety was associated with higher subjective stress responses and higher levels of trust. As a consequence, future studies will need to investigate further various stressors and clarify their effects on social behavior in health and social anxiety disorders.

We appreciate the helpful comments of W. Robert Knechel, J. Reed Smith, Thomas Hemmer (editor), and two anonymous referees. We also thank the participants in the 2013 Workshop on Analytical Research in Financial Accounting, the 2013 Asian-Pacific Conference on International Accounting Issues, the 2014 Annual Congress of the European Accounting Association, the 2014 American Accounting Association Annual Meeting, the 2015 Annual Meeting of the German Academic Association for Business Research, and the 2015 European Auditing Research Network Conference for their valuable remarks and suggestions.

An earlier version of this paper won the Vernon Zimmerman Best Paper Award for the 2013 25th Asian-Pacific Conference on International Accounting Issues.

An important issue on the political agenda of many developed countries is the intensive margin of formal child care and, consequently, the effects of expanding the operating hours of child care institutions. We add to this debate by studying the effects of offering full-day child care on child development. Specifically, we analyze the consequences of a substantial increase of full-day slots at the expense of half-day slots and hence, when holding the extensive margin constant. The conversion was triggered by several reforms to the German child care system. Using unique administrative data covering the full population of eight birth cohorts in one West German state, we find that more hours have a negative effect on children’s socio-emotional well-being. Subgroup analysis suggests that this result is driven by children from disadvantaged family backgrounds, especially those from low-education backgrounds, single-parent households and migrant families. On a brighter note, we find that full-day care has a positive effect on the school readiness of immigrant children.

Background: Citizens in modern democratic societies are confronted with complex demands, challenges, and economic problems, and they typically act as consumers, savers, voters, and employees. It is highly desirable for citizens to be able to competently manage these various demands. This ability we call economic-civic competence. Given the lack of empirical findings and adequate instruments on this issue, we analyze the economic-civic competence of commercial apprentices in Germany and Switzerland. In Swiss commercial apprenticeships, the fostering of this competence is explicitly anchored in the curricula of vocational schools. In Germany, the curricula coverage is not as broad as in Switzerland, which leads to an assumption of country differences in civic-economic competence.

Methods: A total of 1255 apprentices in the commercial occupations/branches of industrial clerk and logistic clerk were assessed at the end of their second or third training year. Our newly developed, reliable and valid technology-based assessment on economic-civic competence includes issues such as the Euro crisis and public debt.

Results and conclusions: An advantage among the male trainees, which was expected from previous research, was confirmed only among the German logistic clerks. The expected gender effect was not observed among the German industrial clerks or the Swiss clerks. Furthermore, the results confirm the hypothesized higher scores among German trainees with a university entrance degree. In both countries, the industrial clerks scored significantly higher than the logistic clerks did, and the Swiss trainees scored higher than did their German counterparts in a comparable occupation. This difference becomes markedly stronger if only learners without a university entrance degree are considered. One possible explanation for the country difference may be that the promotion of economic-civic competence has a more prominent role in Swiss vocational schools during commercial apprenticeship. Considering the methodological restrictions, the findings should be interpreted primarily as explorative depictions of the characteristics and group differences of economic-civic competence. However, our study can also be seen in the broader context of contemporary interest and challenges in developing technology-based assessment within the field of education. Thus, our study contributes to further research on the characteristics and genesis of economic-civic competences as well as on technology-based assessments.

Background
The study aims to investigate stress-inducing potentials of problem-solving activities (e.g., goal elaboration, decision making, and information seeking) within an authentic problem-solving task from the business administration domain. Furthermore, the study aims to investigate stress-reducing potentials of personal characteristics (e.g., self-efficacy beliefs, vocational experience).

Methods
A mixed-methods design was chosen to investigate in-depth processes during domain-specific problem solving, using a computer-based office simulation. Personal characteristics were assessed by questionnaires and tests before the task. Cardiovascular and electrodermal reactivity were measured continuously during the task. Problem-solving activities were coded on the basis of screencasts and think-aloud recordings. Changes in physiological reactivity were estimated on the basis of problem-solving activities and personal characteristics via multilevel regression analyses.

Results
The problem-solving task in general was associated with stress reactions. There were no significant main effects of self-efficacy beliefs, vocational experience, and general intelligence. However, changes in heart rate depended on an interaction between vocational experience and activities including goal elaboration and definition. Furthermore, problem-solving activities including decision making were significantly associated with an increase of amplitudes of detected skin conductance responses. A negative correlation found between the problem-solving score and the LF/HF ratio indicates that higher physiological arousal during the problem-solving task was accompanied by lower problem-solving performance.

Conclusion
It seems to be worthwhile to integrate physiological methods in domain-specific research practice to a greater extent. An essential advantage of such methods can be seen in the measurements’ relative independence from self-reported biases that seems to be especially important for high-frequency measurements within the scope of process-accompanying surveys and/or when investigating implicit aspects of action processes: from this, some new methodological perspectives for empirical research in VET could be developed. However, one has to consider that physiological measures alone are not objective or meaningful in this context, but rather have to be interpreted in their interplay with psychological parameters (e.g., experiences, behaviors) or with particular situational stimuli.

We investigate the effect of having opposite sex siblings on cognitive and noncognitive skills of children in the United States at the onset of formal education. Our identification strategy rests on the assumption that, conditional on covariates, the sibling sex composition of the two firstborn children in a family is arguably exogenous. With regard to cognitive skills, learning skills and self-control measured in kindergarten, we find that boys benefit from having a sister, while there is no effect for girls. We also find evidence for the effect fading out as early as first grade.