This study explores whether middle-school students can exploit explicitly addressed crosslinguistic lexical similarities between German and English to learn vocabulary more efficiently. Across six weeks, 260 Swiss German learners of English as a foreign language (17 classes) completed three vocabulary learning tests (T1, T2 and T3). Additionally,…

Building on rich training literature, we examined which skills constituting the control-of-variables strategy (CVS) benefit from a comprehensive training, and which develop similarly during content-focused inquiry at ages 10-12. In addition, we examined whether prior knowledge, reasoning abilities, and reading comprehension explain variation in…

Thriving is a developmental process that is shaped by previous and current interactions within developmental contexts. We hypothesized that academic performance in the school context will positively predict thriving in young adulthood. Data of N = 2,043 students from Zurich were assessed with standardized tests in Grades 1, 3, 6, and 9. Results…

One important issue of the current empirical research on special education is the investigation of the effects of inclusive education compared to segregating education for students with learning disabilities (LD). For this purpose, measurement instruments have to be appropriate for students with LD and measurement equivalent across students with…

Background: A student's choice to engage in a learning task is highly related to the student's environmental stimuli and his or her perception of interest. From this perspective, the construct of situational interest (SI) has been used to interpret students' motivation in task engagement. SI is assumed to be transitory, environmentally activated,…

Recent research indicates that the development of antisocial behavior among students is influenced by the behavioral characteristics of their classmates. However, not all peers in a given class may exert the same influence. Thus, we examined the extent to which individual development is predicted by the perceived proportion of all students with…

The present study investigated the longitudinal association between the development of bullying (traditional bullying and cyberbullying) and the development of moral deficiencies (moral disengagement, low moral responsibility, and weak feelings of remorse) during adolescence. A total of 960 Swiss adolescents completed an electronic questionnaire…

This article provides a summary of efforts and projects related to the provision of gifted students and talent development in Swiss schools and with partners in the German speaking Central Europe. In the first part, relevant activities about teacher education in Switzerland based on a cooperative arrangement with the University of Connecticut will…