This research addresses two important developments in the academic field: First, universities are transforming into organisational actors, gaining more responsibilities and capacities for strategic action, and second, competition has reached a new level. An important driver of competition and universities' development towards strategic actorhood…

Places to study at medical schools are scarce, which makes well-designed selection procedures employing criteria with predictive validity for good students and doctors necessary. In Germany, the pre-university grade point average (pu-GPA) is the main selection criterion for medical school application. However, this is criticised. According to a…

Over the past decades, the demand for scientific research to link theory and practice so that innovative solutions can be developed through research has steadily increased (Klees & Tillmann, 2015; Sandoval & Bell, 2004). In this context, the design-based research (DBR) approach was developed, which examines the research object and the…

Criteria lists of academic skills are widely used to assess the work readiness of people who are looking to enter or re-enter the apprenticeship market. These instruments represent a particular hurdle in the path to vocational training for low-skilled would-be trainees. We investigate the validity of one such list used in Germany. As different…

Purpose: To continue to stay relevant in the era of Industry Revolution 4.0 (IR4.0) alongside the unprecedented disruption of COVID-19, the importance of lifelong learning is indisputable though this concept has existed for decades. In this context, open and distance learning (ODL) institutions are urged to re-think and re-design their online…

Instructional videos are a popular teaching and learning tool. Teachers use already existing videos and develop their own videos, in which they explain important domain concepts. The effectiveness of these videos depends on their instructional quality. To support future teachers in creating high-quality videos, we developed a training and compared…

Previous research has shown that social inequalities in the transition to higher education are a persistent phenomenon in Germany. Additionally, studies indicate that graduates from vocational schools are less likely to enter higher education, compared to their peers who graduated from general schools. However, research is scarce about how social…

We investigated how the sequence of presenting social media sources in an unsupervised inductive learning setting supports the acquisition of source evaluation skills in two different age groups. Participants were 63 upper and 59 lower secondary students. They had to identify characteristics of trustworthiness while studying sources labeled as…

The global diffusion of the graduate school organizational model has shifted the way future academic excellence is identified from a paternalistic master-disciple relationship to a collective organizational decision. 'Eminent men' used to recruit PhD students on the firm belief that they could identify excellence and integrate it in their own…

Our study aims to provide empirical evidence for and against the valid use of primary school students' ratings of three generic dimensions of teaching quality (classroom management, supportive climate, cognitive activation). We examine whether students discriminate between corresponding dimensions in different subjects, taking into account whether…

Research on student selection mostly focuses on accepted applicants and the effects of selection procedures. In this sense, most samples seem to be biased, which is well-reflected in the literature. The present study investigates student selection regarding students who had been initially de-selected but finally succeeded in the admission process.…

The phenomenon of first impression is well researched in social psychology, but less so in the study of OSCEs and the multiple mini interview (MMI). To explore its bearing on the MMI method we included a rating of first impression in the MMI for student selection executed 2012 at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany (196…

The boundaries between universities of applied sciences and universities in the binary higher education system in Germany have begun to blur. This is likely to affect the criteria for hiring professors, too. The article investigates whether or not there is a similarity of the relative weight universities of applied sciences and universities put on…

Learning Analytics are an academic field with promising usage scenarios for many educational domains. At the same time, learning analytics come with threats such as the amplification of historically grown inequalities. A range of general guidelines for more equity-focused learning analytics have been proposed but fail to provide sufficiently clear…

As argumentation is an activity at the heart of mathematics, (not only) German school curricula request students to construct mathematical arguments, which get evaluated by teachers. However, it remains unclear which criteria teachers use to decide on a specific grade in a summative assessment setting. In this paper, we draw on two sources for…