University examinations categorise students according to their individual achievements determined by teaching staff. This procedure serves the elicitation and certification of student knowledge and thus reproduces academic hierarchies. Drawing on empirical evidence from ethnographic fieldwork in Engineering and History departments, this article…

Humanoid robots are gradually becoming part of everyday life as well as education. Virtual agents have demonstrated their benefits for years, and experts expect similar positive effects from the use of humanoid robots in education. Project H.E.A.R.T. (Humanoid Emotional Assistant Robots in Teaching), from Philipps-University Marburg, has developed…

Purpose: In sports games, coaches often use tactic boards to present tactical instructions during time-outs (e.g., 20 s to 60 s in basketball). Instructions should be presented in a way that enables fast and errorless information processing for the players. The aim of this study was to test the effect of different orientations of visual tactical…

In recent years, the ability to use mathematics flexibly in everyday situations is increasingly accentuated, and mathematics education gives more and more attention to problems with realistic contexts. However, it is reported very often that learners have substantial difficulties in connecting mathematics to real situations. In order to solve…

Computer-assisted assessment (CAA) is widely used in modern university courses in many different fields. It can be used both in formative and summative assessments and with different emphasis on (self-)training, grading, and feedback generation. This article reports on experiences from using the CAA tool "JACK" to support a university…

Cross-disciplinary skills are today's key skills for media informatics students to gain employment after graduation. However, such problem-based learning projects almost never take place due to organizational struggles. The authors suggest Scrum, a framework that is increasingly used in software engineering, as a solution for the challenges. Scrum…

Prismatic refraction is a classic topic in science education. To investigate how undergraduate students think about prismatic dispersion, and to see how they change their thinking when observing dispersed images, five teaching experiments were done and analysed according to the Model of Educational Reconstruction. For projection through a prism,…

According to the model of constructive alignment, learners adjust their learning strategies to the announced assessment (backwash effect). Hence, when teaching for understanding, the assessment method should be aligned with this teaching goal to ensure that learners engage in corresponding learning strategies. A quasi-experimental field study with…

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…

While to date, multimedia research has examined mainly the learning of texts with accompanying pictures, in the current paper, 2 experiments are presented that examine the multimedia effect for pictures with accompanying spoken text. In Experiment 1, we examined whether learning is better with a multimedia presentation in which pictorial…

We introduce a specific type of item for knowledge tests, confidence-weighted true-false (CTF) items, and review experiences of its application in psychology courses. A CTF item is a statement about the learning content to which students respond whether the statement is true or false, and they rate their confidence level. Previous studies using…

To improve teaching in higher education, teachers in psychology are encouraged to use evidence-based teaching, that is, to apply empirical findings regarding learning and teaching, when designing learning opportunities. This report illustrates the combination of evidence-based teaching and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in teaching…

Governments worldwide are changing their educational policies to improve student performance. Some of these reforms involve the introduction of high-stakes testing, which often creates negative effects such as "teaching to the test". This article deals with the use of low-stakes testing in the German states of Hesse and Bremen, and…

Computers are considered innovative in classrooms, raising expectations of increased cognitive learning outcomes or motivation with effects on Deeper Learning (DL). The "new medium", however, may cause cognitive overloads. Combined with gender-related variations in ability, self-efficacy or self-confidence, computers may even diminish…

Curriculum materials explicitly designed to foster teacher learning represent a prominent route to professional development (PD) for teachers. However, it is unclear whether PD can be delivered successfully in the form of teacher self-study of curriculum materials, or whether it has to be scaffolded additionally by an expert. This study…