Designing and interpreting controlled experiments are important inquiry skills addressed in many current science curricula. The relevant skills associated with the design and interpretation of controlled experiments are summarised under the term control-of-variables strategy (CVS). Research on elementary school students' CVS skills shows that they…

This quasi-experimental study compares preferences for the amount of instructional guidance between creative and noncreative learners. Instructional guidance is implemented as a two-level factor represented as two variants of a visual design task, only differing in the amount of verbal guidance they gave. Dependent preference outcomes were…

The study examines language dimensions of mathematical word problems and the classification of mathematical word problems according to these dimensions with unsupervised machine learning (ML) techniques. Previous research suggests that the language dimensions are important for mathematical word problems because it has an influence on the…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to determine whether students' self-assessment (SSA) could be used as a significant attribute to predict students' future academic achievement. Design/methodology/approach: The authors address how well students can assess their abilities and study the relationship between this ability and demographic…

This meta-analytic study compared the effect of peer-led learning versus non peer-led learning on students' cognitive achievement in post-secondary education. Twenty-eight studies published in English from six countries between 1993 and 2017 were identified and used in the analysis. Result of the analysis on the random-effect model showed a…

In this paper we describe a "Train the Tutor" programme (TtT) for developing the metacognitive skills, facilitator skills, and tutor skills of students in a problem based learning (PBL) context. The purpose of the programme was to train 2nd and 3rd year undergraduate students in psychology to become effective PBL tutors for…

The motivation to engage in a task is directly related to its perceived value according to Deci & Ryan (1985). Increasing motivation can lead to a higher enhanced learning achievement for the student. The question is if using digital technologies in inquiry-based learning lessons influences the learners' situationally perceived value of the…

Many debates in higher education center around the role of approaches to teaching (measured with ATI-R) and impact of academic disciplines (soft vs. hard) on teaching practice, e.g. advice giving. An online study with N = 70 academic teachers was conducted and the advice given was content analyzed. Regression analyses showed that academics with a…

Emotional designing describes the elicitation of positive affect during learning through specific design elements of the learning environment to enhance learning. This experimental study examined the effectivity of an emotional design procedure on learning performance. Moreover, the learner's affective states before learning were taken into…

The main aim of this study was to determine the factors that affect the environmental literacy (EL) of 15-year-old students in Germany. The data were based on findings from the PISA 2015 of German students (n = 6.504), which were published on the official PISA site (http://www.pisa.oecd.org). According to the results, there was a positive and…

Student ratings of teaching quality have been shown to be powerful predictors of important academic outcome variables. This is the case despite the fact that students from the same classroom can perceive teaching quality quite differently in their own idiosyncratic ways. These differences among students in the same classroom are typically…

Students' school success in literacy and numeracy is often hampered by limited prerequisites in these domains, yet the effectiveness of different approaches to support students is unclear. Using professional training programmes for kindergarten teachers, we tested the effects of three kindergarten approaches in a quasi-experimental pre- and…

This paper estimates the effect of tuition fees on enrolment behaviour among prospective students in Germany. According to the rational choice theory (RCT), we argue that due to the higher costs brought on by such fees tuition fees should have a negative effect on student's enrolment. This should be even more pronounced among prospective students…

Within the curriculum guidelines for Bavaria, we designed a hands-on educational programme for teaching sustainability with regard to agriculture, food and consumerism, partly implemented on a farm as an out-of-school learning setting. The participants were fifth graders ("N"?=?176). The research followed a quasi-experimental design and…

Multimedia integration signals highlight correspondences between text and pictures with the aim of supporting learning from multimedia. A recent meta-analysis revealed that only learners with low domain-specific prior knowledge benefit from multimedia integration signals. To more thoroughly investigate the influence of prior knowledge on the…