Are public policies effective in enhancing gender balance in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduate education? Although the literature is rich in studies that prescribe micro-level interventions to promote gender balance in specific STEM areas or institutions, there are surprisingly few studies that quantitatively…

Large-scale surveys typically exhibit data structures characterized by rich mutual dependencies between surveyed variables and individual-specific skip patterns. Despite high efforts in fieldwork and questionnaire design, missing values inevitably occur. One approach for handling missing values is to provide multiply imputed data sets, thus…

Students' and pre-service teachers' conceptions of scientists have been assessed in a variety of studies. One of the most commonly used instruments is the Draw-A-Scientist Test (DAST) which offers the advantage that no verbal skills are needed by the participants. In some studies, methodical challenges related to the DAST have been discussed; for…

Numeracy and literacy skills have become increasingly important in modern labour markets. The large gender differences that several studies have identified have therefore sparked considerable attention among researchers and policy makers. Little is known about the moment in which such gaps emerge, how they evolve and if their evolution differs…

The present article aims to show how to model longitudinal change in cohort sequential data applying latent true change models using Mplus' multi-group approach. The underlying modeling ideas are described and explained in this article. As an example, change in internalizing problem behaviors between the age of 8 and 13 years is modeled and…

The topic of the present paper is how successful young people from a migration background in Germany are in making the transition to initial vocational education and training (VET). Particular emphasis is placed on interactions with social origin and gender. The analyses are based on the 2011 BIBB Transitional Study, a representative survey of…

The present article analyzes the development of the ethnic gap--with respect to the attainment of vocational degrees--over the immigration cohorts 1960-2001 by examining how social integration indicators and general secondary school education may help to explain the trend. It was found that the gap between natives and migrants increased. Above…

In Western cultures, life narratives are typically expected to recount the narrator's life from birth to the present. Disparate autobiographical memories need to be integrated into a more or less coherent story, which is facilitated by an overarching temporal macrostructure. The temporal macrostructure consists of elaborated beginnings that…

Nowadays, women outperform men in educational attainment in many countries. Still, large variation between countries remains. Emancipatory contexts in which individuals are raised might explain these differences in male-female educational attainment, both over time and across countries. This study examines individual and contextual factors that…

This study contributes on instructional methods from a validation technical point of view. The focus is on the evaluation of instructional methods in relation to knowledge processes in the act of learning. In questionnaires, computer science teachers, mathematics teachers, and English teachers evaluated 20 instructional methods in terms of…

Research tells us much about the effects of primary and lower-secondary schooling on skills inequality, but we know less about the impact of the next stage of education. This article uses a differences-in-differences analysis of data on literacy and numeracy skills in PISA 2000 and SAS 2011/12 to assess the contribution of upper-secondary…