A decline of gender-speci®c underachievement among gifted girls can be observed. So, is this topic becoming gradually obsolete or do certain kinds of underachievement still exist? We investigated achievement and related factors among 10th-grade gifted girls in comparison to gifted boys in two separate settings: in a regular German secondary upper-level school, the Gymnasium (study 1, n=31); and in a curriculum-compressing acceleration program within the Gymnasium system (study 2, n=116). In both school settings gender differences were found to exist: in the regular setting these differences are equally distributed; in the gifted program, on the other hand, they rather favor the girls. Nevertheless, for both settings lower self-con®dence in the math self-concept can be observed among the girls. All in all, the ®ndings reported here make obvious that things actually have changed and a general convergence of boys and girls can be observed. However, it also became clear that some decisive differencesÐespecially on behavioral levelsÐstill exist.
For intervention programs that are applied in natural settings, randomization often is difficult or impossible to achieve. If treated individuals are compared with individuals from a nonrandomized comparison group, the inference of causality can be biased. Similar distributions in the relevant characteristics of the treatment and the comparison groups cannot be expected. To adjust between-group comparisons for preexisting differences, this article proposes a simple matching procedure. This procedure involves pairing of treatment and comparison individuals based on observable characteristics, using Euclidean distance scores. Application of the proposed Euclidean-distance matching (EuM) procedure to data from the Viennese E-Lecturing (VEL) project yields satisfying results. Possible generalizations and applications of the EuM procedure are discussed.
Evaluation of teaching at universities is traditionally realized in terms of student ratings. Curriculum evaluation is rarely done in a systematic manner. More often, the emphasis is placed on a particular aspect, which is only of little help in terms of modifying education. A very prominent example is that of medical education. Here, evaluations of curricula primarily focus on new curricula by contrasting them to traditional ones. The article at hand deals with a different evaluation approach, in which five phases have to be considered and contrasting results to other teaching formats are not the main focus. In this article, the authors concentrate on the first phase (baseline evaluation) of the systematic evaluation of a medical curriculum. They describe several challenges of such an evaluation approach and illustrate the strategies used to overcome them. In addition, associated relevant empirical findings from this evaluation study are presented.
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