Expertise is featured by continued high performance in a particular domain. Expertise research has primarily focused on absolute expertise in structured domains such as chess and emphasized the significance of deliberate practice for expertise development. We investigated the development of relative expertise in commercial domains as part of…

Mentoring is acknowledged as an essential prerequisite for successful teacher induction, but its effectiveness may vary depending on the mentor's quality of support and the mentee's initial professional beliefs. Focusing on novice teachers' self-efficacy and emotional management, this longitudinal study investigates how constructivist- and…

Prior studies in the Computer Science education literature have illustrated that novices make many mistakes in composing SQL queries. Query formulation proves to be difficult for students. Only recently, some headway was made towards understanding why SQL leads to so many mistakes, by uncovering student misconceptions. In this article, we shed new…

Background & Aims: Cognitive load theory assumes that the higher the learner's prior knowledge (i.e., the more expert the learner), the lower the intrinsic cognitive load (complexity) experienced for a given problem. While this is the case in many scenarios, there can be cases in which the converse is also true, resulting in more expert…

In supporting their students' learning in the classroom, noticing is an important professional skill for teachers, encompassing perceiving and interpreting relevant incidents, as well as ad hoc decision-making. While noticing is an established research topic in other domains, it remains largely neglected in relation to the geography teacher. The…

German is a pluricentric language with many standard and nonstandard varieties. Students of German are usually unaware of its rich regional variation, and studies attribute this to limited resources and instructional time (van Kerckvoorde, 2012). The "DACH" model of teaching German, which includes linguistic and cultural elements from…

Creativity has become an increasingly important competence in today's rapidly changing times. It is a central aspect of social development, but it is hardly discussed in schools and often neglected in the natural sciences. In order to promote creativity in science teaching in a targeted way, it is important to understand the perspectives and views…

Purpose: Entrepreneurs can easily slide into severe economic crises (Fichman and Levinthal, 1991), in particular, in the first years after their founding. Additionally, research shows that entrepreneurs often lack a realistic evaluation of the entrepreneurial risks and barriers. Referring to research on cognitive and networked expertise (Ericsson…

Much is known about young children's use of deictic gestures such as pointing. Much less is known about their use of other types of communicative gestures, especially iconic or symbolic gestures. In particular, it is unknown whether children can create iconic gestures on the spot to inform others. Study 1 provided 27-month-olds with the…

Concept maps have a long history in educational settings as a tool for teaching, learning, and assessing. As an assessment tool, they are predominantly used to extract the structural configuration of learners' knowledge. This article presents an investigation of the knowledge structures of a large group of beginning CS students. The investigation…

Evolutionary theory constitutes the overarching concept in biology. There is hardly any other concept that is more complex, and causes more difficulties in learning and teaching. One instructional approach in optimizing the learning of complex topics is to use worked examples combined with self-explanation prompts that fit to the prior knowledge…

In 2 experiments we examined the role of (a) specificity, (b) the type of targeted learning activities, and (c) learners' prior knowledge for the effects of relevance instructions on learning from instructional explanations. In Experiment 1, we recruited novices regarding the topic of atomic structure (N = 80) and found that "specific"…

Two studies were conducted to investigate effects of domain knowledge on metacognitive monitoring across the life span in materials of different complexity. Participants from 4 age groups (3rd-grade children, adolescents, younger and older adults) were compared using an expert-novice paradigm. In Study 1, soccer experts' and novices'…

We assessed the impact of expert students' instructional quality on the academic performance of novice students in 12th-grade physics classes organized in an expert model of cooperative learning ("jigsaw classroom"). The instructional quality of 129 expert students was measured by a newly developed rating system. As expected, when…

Contemporary office work is becoming increasingly challenging as many routine tasks are automated or outsourced. The remaining problem solving activities may also offer potential for lifelong learning in the workplace. In this study, we analyzed problem solving in an office work setting using an Internet-based, semi-standardized diary to collect…