Previous research has repeatedly confirmed that students with special educational needs (SEN) are generally less accepted by their peers. Although inclusive teaching strategies and classroom characteristics are frequently hypothesised to improve students' social participation, empirical evidence is scarce. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is…

A frequent observation in the school context is that opportunities to learn from errors are often missed. However, a positive error climate may support learning from errors. For the school subject of mathematics, some findings about characteristics of the error climate already exist. But, a comparison of the error climate between different school…

The term 'Plant Blindness' describes people tending to overlook plants, even though they have an enormous importance for life on earth, especially because of their ability to photosynthesise. Many attempts have been made to counteract plant blindness in biology education. However, so far there is no comprehensive tool to assess the degree of plant…

In school classes students influence each other at conscious and subconscious levels and therefore, students' shared perceptions are considered meaningful for the development of the individual student. This article identified situations where students' class-average perceptions of autonomy support add to the predictive validity of students'…

When administering tests across grades, vertical scaling is often employed to place scores from different tests on a common overall scale so that test-takers' progress can be tracked. In order to be able to link the results across grades, however, common items are needed that are included in both test forms. In the literature there seems to be no…

The ViSC Social Competence Program has been implemented in Austrian schools within the scope of a national strategy plan, Together Against Violence. The program is a primary preventive program designed for grades 5 to 8. The prevention of aggression and bullying is defined as a school development task, and the initial implementation of the program…

While many studies confirm that positive emotions, including enjoyment, lead to better student achievement, less empirical evidence exists about possible mediator variables that link achievement to enjoyment. It is proposed that achievement and enjoyment form a circular dependency; enjoyment in learning leads to higher achievement but a degree of…

This paper deals with the time students spend working at home for school. In Study 1, we investigated amount and regulation of time. Study 2 serves to validate the results of Study 1 and, in addition, investigates the duration of the time units students used and their relation to scholastic success. In Study 1, the participants were 332 students…

The study investigated age and gender effects on coping with common stressors among 494 Austrian children and adolescents (age 8-14 years). Participants were subdivided into subgroups of late children comprising third and fourth graders, early adolescents consisting of fifth and sixth graders, and middle adolescents including seventh graders.…