CONTROVERSIAL DEBATES

Managing diversity at school: Should students be grouped by their ability?
Differences in students’ cognitive capabilities affect schooling outcomes from the very beginning, and they make it a challenge to provide appropriate learning environments for the entire achievement spectrum. While in some countries students go to comprehensive schools for the first ten years, others have implemented tracking systems after grade 4. There is an ongoing debate about whether students’ needs can be better met in homogeneous learning groups, or whether heterogeneity stimulates learning. A related question concerns whether it is better to integrate or separate students from the extremes of the achievement distribution: Should gifted students and students with learning difficulties stay in regular classrooms or not?

Camilla Benbow, Professor of Psychology, Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University will argue in favor of tracking, while Robert Slavin, co-director of the Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, will argue for comprehensive schooling. The discussion will be moderated by Elsbeth Stern, Professor for Research on Learning and Instruction at the ETH Zurich / Switzerland who has been involved in the ongoing debate about school tracking in Germany.


Should psychologists adopt the experimental practices of economics?
– Motivate, explain and don‘t deceive
Economists experiment on many of the same processes that interest psychologists – decision-making, the experience of emotion, conceptions of fairness, motivation to work and so on. They have done so while often being highly critical – sometimes even dismissive – of the results obtained by psychologists in these areas. For example, one criticism is that no meaningful inferences can be made about the rationality of human decision-making
from performing studies on subjects who are not motivated, who have no opportunity to learn and who have not had the task clearly explained to them. Another probing criticism is that psychologists‘ penchant for deceiving their subjects is not only immoral, but counter-productive as it induces suspicion, distrust and counter-strategies in the subject population.

An economist noted for work on behavioural issues, Andreas Ortmann, Professor at CERGE, Charles University, and Senior Researcher at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague will present these criticisms of psychological method, while Fritz Strack, Professor of Social Psychology and Chair at the University of Würzburg, Germany, will respond. The discussion will
be moderated by Denis Hilton, Professor of Social Psychology, from the University of Toulouse, who has interests in experimental economics.


Do chimpanzees have culture?
Different populations of chimpanzees in the wild engage in different behavioral practices, some of which are very likely socially learned across generations. Some researchers have thus claimed that chimpanzees, like humans, live in
cultures. Other researchers have focused on the specific processes by which these behavioral practices might be socially learned and noted differences to the human case – arguing that chimpanzees may have culture but it is very
different from human culture. The issue addressed in this debate is the extent to which and the ways in which the chimpanzee and human versions of culture are similar and different.

Prof. Dr. Christophe Boesch, Director of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany will argue in favor and Mike Tomasello Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany will argue against. The discussion will be moderated by Peter Hammerstein, Professor of Biology at Humboldt University, Berlin.