For the last three decades, moderate constructivism has become an increasingly prominent perspective in science education. Researchers have defined characteristics of constructivist-oriented science classrooms, but the implementation of such science teaching in daily classroom practice seems difficult. Against this background, we conducted a…

Detecting self-generated actions and imitating other-generated actions are important abilities in order to interact with others. The relationship between these domains was investigated in 6-8-month-old infants. In a contingency-preference task, infants observed their own legs on a real-time and a delayed video display. In an imitation task, the…

In L2 reading, words and the concepts they denote frequently constitute an important vehicle or obstacle in the comprehension process. However, this has been rarely explored from a language awareness perspective. The current research therefore tailors the constructs of lexical awareness and conceptual awareness to L2 reading contexts by using a…

This article combines different conceptualizations of teachers' diagnostic competence in listening to students' mathematical thinking processes on the levels of general perspectives, noticed aspects and activated didactic categories. An empirical study of 159 prospective mathematics teachers' diagnostic judgments investigated how these levels are…

Goal clarity is an essential element of classroom dialogue and a component of effective instruction. Until now, teachers have been struggling to implement goal clarity in the classroom dialogue. In the present study, we investigated the classroom practice of teachers in a video-based intervention called the Dialogic Video Cycle (DVC) and compared…

Background: Complexity models have provided a suitable framework in various domains to assess students' educational achievement. Complexity is often used as the analytical focus when regarding learning outcomes, i.e. when analyzing written tests or problem-centered interviews. Numerous studies reveal negative correlations between the complexity of…

In all human cultures, people gesture iconically. However, the evolutionary basis of iconic gestures is unknown. In this study, chimpanzees and bonobos, and 2- and 3-year-old children, learned how to operate two apparatuses to get rewards. Then, at test, only a human adult had access to the apparatuses, and participants could instruct her about…

Being challenged by opposing views in a controversial discussion can stimulate the production of more elaborate and sophisticated argumentations. According to the model of argument reappraisal (Leitão, 2000), such processes require transactivity, meaning that students do not only give reasons to support their own position (e.g., pro/contra…

Nowadays, there is a consensus that good teaching and learning needs instructional variation and personalised forms of learning. In teacher education, these concepts have been implemented for years, and prospective teachers are taught accordingly; it is thus assumed that the teaching of novice teachers is in accordance with these new teaching…

This study investigated the development of sharing expectations and sharing behavior in 3 groups of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children. We examined (a) whether preschool children expect a person to share more with a friend than with a disliked peer and (b) whether their expectation about others' sharing behavior depends on whether there is a cost or…

The COACTIV video study is part of the COACTIV research program in which secondary mathematics teachers whose students participated in PISA 03/04 were examined, with respect to their professional knowledge, motivational orientations, beliefs, and self-regulation. In the video study, 284 German secondary mathematics teachers were asked to specify…

This study examined lexical-phonological interactions in the first 50 words of a group of monolingual German- and Spanish-speaking children and bilingual German--Spanish children. The phonological characteristics of the earliest target word forms and output patterns of these children were analyzed to determine whether bilingual children select…

A significant and growing percentage of the children enrolled in early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs in Europe and the United States are children of recent im/migrants. For most young (3-5 years old) children of parents who have come from other countries, ECEC settings are the first context in which they come face to face with…

This paper is based on educational anthropology, and presents the initial findings of a three-year international comparative study of primary school children's learning-processes during travel and cross-cultural encounters. A French-German research team investigated and here reports on primary school exchange programmes. Open coding of the…

Human social interaction depends on individuals identifying the common ground they have with others, based both on personally shared experiences and on cultural common ground that all members of the group share. We introduced 3- and 5-year-old children to a culturally well-known object and a novel object. An experimenter then entered and asked,…