Martin J Tomasik
Biographic Data
| ID | 4233975 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Martin J Tomasik |
| GIVEN NAMES | Martin J |
| FAMILY NAME | Tomasik |
| SIGNATURE | TOMASIK M J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Zurich |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5235-3551 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 93 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Exploring the structure of the school curriculum with graph neural networks
School curricula guide the daily learning activities of millions of students. They embody the understanding of the education experts who designed them of how to organize the knowledge that students should acquire in a way that is optimal for learning. This can be viewed as a learning ’theory’ which is, nevertheless, rarely put to the test. Here, we model a data set obtained from a Computer-Based Formative Assessment system used by thousands of st…
Formalizing developmental phenomena as continuous-time systems: Relations between mathematics and language development
We demonstrate how developmental theories may be instantiated as statistical models, using hierarchical continuous-time dynamic systems. This approach offers a flexible specification and an often more direct link between theory and model parameters than common modeling frameworks. We address developmental theories of the relation between the academic competencies of mathematics and language, using data from the online learning system Mindsteps. W…
Putting an Explanatory Understanding into a Predictive Perspective: An Exemplary Study on School Track Enrollment
Complementing widely used explanatory models in the educational sciences that pinpoint the resources and characteristics for explaining students’ distinct educational transitions, this paper departs from methodological traditions and evaluates the predictive power of established concepts: to what extent can we actually predict school track enrollment based on a plethora of well-known explanatory factors derived from previous research? Predictive …
Ambiguity in European seasonal comparative research: How decisions on modelling shape results on inequality in learning
Summer break study designs are used in educational research to disentangle school from non-school contributions to social performance gaps. The summer breaks provide a natural experimental setting that allows for the measurement of learning progress when school is not in session, which can help to capture the unfolding of social disparities in learning that are the result of non-school influences. Seasonal comparative research has a longer tradit…
Educational gains of in‐person vs. distance learning in primary and secondary schools: A natural experiment during the Covid ‐19 pandemic school closures in Switzerland
Using data from a computer‐based formative feedback system, we compare learning gains in the 8 weeks of school closures related to the COVID‐19 pandemic in Switzerland with learning gains in the 8 weeks before these school closures. The school performance in mathematics and language of N = 28,685 pupils is modelled in second‐order piecewise latent growth models with strict measurement invariance for the two periods under investigation. While seco…
Some evidence for the usefulness of an optimal foraging theory perspective on goal conflict and goal facilitation
Based on optimal foraging theory, we propose a metric that allows evaluating the goodness of goal systems, that is, systems comprising multiple goals with facilitative and conflicting interrelations. This optimal foraging theory takes into account expectancy and value, as well as opportunity costs, of foraging. Applying this approach to goal systems provides a single index of goodness of a goal system for goal striving. Three quasi-experimental s…
Social and Economic Change: Psychological Challenges for Individuals
The Effectiveness of the Life Skills Program Ipsy for the Prevention of Adolescent Tobacco Use: The Mediating Role of Yielding to Peer Pressure
In this study, the effectiveness of a life skills program to impede tobacco use in early adolescence was scrutinized. The focus was on the mediating role of yielding to peer pressure. The universal school-based life skills program IPSY ( Information + Psychosocial Competence = Protection) against adolescent substance use was implemented over 3 years. Over the same time period, it was evaluated based on a longitudinal quasi-experimental design wit…
Negotiating the demands of active ageing: Longitudinal findings from Germany
The challenges of population ageing and globalisation have been addressed by many welfare states in terms of active ageing policies, which in turn confront individuals with new demands such as keeping up to date with technological developments. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how individuals negotiate the demands of active ageing. The outcome variable was change in primary and secondary control strategies with regard to demands of active …
Exploring the stress-buffering effects of religiousness in relation to social and economic change: Evidence from Poland
Religiousness has been found to act as a protective factor against the adverse effects of stressors originating from a variety of sources.Despite ample precedent in sociological theories of religion, however, the potential stress-buffering role of religiousness in relation to stressors arising from macro-level societal trends has not received empirical scrutiny.Recent psychological conceptualizations of social and economic change suggest that suc…
Religiosity Reduces Family-Related Uncertainties but Exacerbates Their Association with Distress
The present study investigated the role of religiosity in dealing with family-related uncertainties (e.g., uncertainty concerning fertility decisions or the stability of family relationships) that arise from current social change in industrialized nations. We hypothesized that religiosity, because it is a central source of family values and norms, reduces individuals' perceived load of family-related uncertainties. At the same time, because perce…
Beneficial effects of disengagement from futile struggles with occupational planning: A contextualist-motivational approach
Globalized labor markets confront many adults, both employed and unemployed, with demands arising from career uncertainty that have the potential to jeopardize their occupational planning. This article investigated how individuals in different regions of Germany, which are characterized by different economic opportunities, negotiate such demands to pursue a career. The central hypothesis is that under unfavorable economic conditions, disengagemen…
Demands of Social Change as a Function of the Political Context, Institutional Filters, and Psychosocial Resources
Longitudinal Findings on Aging-Related Cognitions, Control Beliefs, and Health in Later Life
We examined the influence of individual views of aging on health changes in later life. We hypothesized that aging-related cognitions affect health changes irrespective of control beliefs and that the impact of aging-related cognitions on health is higher than for the reverse direction of causality. We based our analyses on data from the longitudinal part of the German Aging Survey (N = 1,286; participants were 40-85 years of age at baseline). Be…
Gender Differences in Subjective Well-Being: Comparing Societies with Respect to Gender Equality
Gender Differences in Subjective Well-Being: Comparing Societies with Respect to Gender Equality
Longitudinal Findings on Aging-Related Cognitions, Control Beliefs, and Health in Later Life
We examined the influence of individual views of aging on health changes in later life. We hypothesized that aging-related cognitions affect health changes irrespective of control beliefs and that the impact of aging-related cognitions on health is higher than for the reverse direction of causality. We based our analyses on data from the longitudinal part of the German Aging Survey (N = 1,286; participants were 40-85 years of age at baseline). Be…
Demands of Social Change as a Function of the Political Context, Institutional Filters, and Psychosocial Resources
Beneficial effects of disengagement from futile struggles with occupational planning: A contextualist-motivational approach
Globalized labor markets confront many adults, both employed and unemployed, with demands arising from career uncertainty that have the potential to jeopardize their occupational planning. This article investigated how individuals in different regions of Germany, which are characterized by different economic opportunities, negotiate such demands to pursue a career. The central hypothesis is that under unfavorable economic conditions, disengagemen…
Negotiating the demands of active ageing: Longitudinal findings from Germany
The challenges of population ageing and globalisation have been addressed by many welfare states in terms of active ageing policies, which in turn confront individuals with new demands such as keeping up to date with technological developments. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how individuals negotiate the demands of active ageing. The outcome variable was change in primary and secondary control strategies with regard to demands of active …
Some evidence for the usefulness of an optimal foraging theory perspective on goal conflict and goal facilitation
Based on optimal foraging theory, we propose a metric that allows evaluating the goodness of goal systems, that is, systems comprising multiple goals with facilitative and conflicting interrelations. This optimal foraging theory takes into account expectancy and value, as well as opportunity costs, of foraging. Applying this approach to goal systems provides a single index of goodness of a goal system for goal striving. Three quasi-experimental s…
Religiosity Reduces Family-Related Uncertainties but Exacerbates Their Association with Distress
The present study investigated the role of religiosity in dealing with family-related uncertainties (e.g., uncertainty concerning fertility decisions or the stability of family relationships) that arise from current social change in industrialized nations. We hypothesized that religiosity, because it is a central source of family values and norms, reduces individuals' perceived load of family-related uncertainties. At the same time, because perce…
Longitudinal Findings on Aging-Related Cognitions, Control Beliefs, and Health in Later Life
We examined the influence of individual views of aging on health changes in later life. We hypothesized that aging-related cognitions affect health changes irrespective of control beliefs and that the impact of aging-related cognitions on health is higher than for the reverse direction of causality. We based our analyses on data from the longitudinal part of the German Aging Survey (N = 1,286; participants were 40-85 years of age at baseline). Be…
Gender Differences in Subjective Well-Being: Comparing Societies with Respect to Gender Equality
Demands of Social Change as a Function of the Political Context, Institutional Filters, and Psychosocial Resources
Beneficial effects of disengagement from futile struggles with occupational planning: A contextualist-motivational approach
Globalized labor markets confront many adults, both employed and unemployed, with demands arising from career uncertainty that have the potential to jeopardize their occupational planning. This article investigated how individuals in different regions of Germany, which are characterized by different economic opportunities, negotiate such demands to pursue a career. The central hypothesis is that under unfavorable economic conditions, disengagemen…
Exploring the stress-buffering effects of religiousness in relation to social and economic change: Evidence from Poland
Religiousness has been found to act as a protective factor against the adverse effects of stressors originating from a variety of sources.Despite ample precedent in sociological theories of religion, however, the potential stress-buffering role of religiousness in relation to stressors arising from macro-level societal trends has not received empirical scrutiny.Recent psychological conceptualizations of social and economic change suggest that suc…
Religiosity Reduces Family-Related Uncertainties but Exacerbates Their Association with Distress
The present study investigated the role of religiosity in dealing with family-related uncertainties (e.g., uncertainty concerning fertility decisions or the stability of family relationships) that arise from current social change in industrialized nations. We hypothesized that religiosity, because it is a central source of family values and norms, reduces individuals' perceived load of family-related uncertainties. At the same time, because perce…
Negotiating the demands of active ageing: Longitudinal findings from Germany
The challenges of population ageing and globalisation have been addressed by many welfare states in terms of active ageing policies, which in turn confront individuals with new demands such as keeping up to date with technological developments. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how individuals negotiate the demands of active ageing. The outcome variable was change in primary and secondary control strategies with regard to demands of active …
Social and Economic Change: Psychological Challenges for Individuals
The Effectiveness of the Life Skills Program Ipsy for the Prevention of Adolescent Tobacco Use: The Mediating Role of Yielding to Peer Pressure
In this study, the effectiveness of a life skills program to impede tobacco use in early adolescence was scrutinized. The focus was on the mediating role of yielding to peer pressure. The universal school-based life skills program IPSY ( Information + Psychosocial Competence = Protection) against adolescent substance use was implemented over 3 years. Over the same time period, it was evaluated based on a longitudinal quasi-experimental design wit…
Some evidence for the usefulness of an optimal foraging theory perspective on goal conflict and goal facilitation
Based on optimal foraging theory, we propose a metric that allows evaluating the goodness of goal systems, that is, systems comprising multiple goals with facilitative and conflicting interrelations. This optimal foraging theory takes into account expectancy and value, as well as opportunity costs, of foraging. Applying this approach to goal systems provides a single index of goodness of a goal system for goal striving. Three quasi-experimental s…
Ambiguity in European seasonal comparative research: How decisions on modelling shape results on inequality in learning
Summer break study designs are used in educational research to disentangle school from non-school contributions to social performance gaps. The summer breaks provide a natural experimental setting that allows for the measurement of learning progress when school is not in session, which can help to capture the unfolding of social disparities in learning that are the result of non-school influences. Seasonal comparative research has a longer tradit…
Educational gains of in‐person vs. distance learning in primary and secondary schools: A natural experiment during the Covid ‐19 pandemic school closures in Switzerland
Using data from a computer‐based formative feedback system, we compare learning gains in the 8 weeks of school closures related to the COVID‐19 pandemic in Switzerland with learning gains in the 8 weeks before these school closures. The school performance in mathematics and language of N = 28,685 pupils is modelled in second‐order piecewise latent growth models with strict measurement invariance for the two periods under investigation. While seco…
Putting an Explanatory Understanding into a Predictive Perspective: An Exemplary Study on School Track Enrollment
Complementing widely used explanatory models in the educational sciences that pinpoint the resources and characteristics for explaining students’ distinct educational transitions, this paper departs from methodological traditions and evaluates the predictive power of established concepts: to what extent can we actually predict school track enrollment based on a plethora of well-known explanatory factors derived from previous research? Predictive …
Formalizing developmental phenomena as continuous-time systems: Relations between mathematics and language development
We demonstrate how developmental theories may be instantiated as statistical models, using hierarchical continuous-time dynamic systems. This approach offers a flexible specification and an often more direct link between theory and model parameters than common modeling frameworks. We address developmental theories of the relation between the academic competencies of mathematics and language, using data from the online learning system Mindsteps. W…
Exploring the structure of the school curriculum with graph neural networks
School curricula guide the daily learning activities of millions of students. They embody the understanding of the education experts who designed them of how to organize the knowledge that students should acquire in a way that is optimal for learning. This can be viewed as a learning ’theory’ which is, nevertheless, rarely put to the test. Here, we model a data set obtained from a Computer-Based Formative Assessment system used by thousands of st…
Psychology (14 works) · Developmental psychology (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Medicine (6 works) · Psychological Well-being and Life Satisfaction (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Mathematics education (4 works) · Political science (4 works)