Teaching sustainability topics puts teachers in a tense relationship: on one hand, they should convey the importance and urgency of the topic, but at the same time, this should be done in such a way that students can form their own judgements. In addition, teachers may themselves become privately involved and interested in the topic, which…

The purpose of this study is to compare the instructional practices in science education in Malaysian and German secondary schools. Specifically, the objectives of this research are to seek answers for the following questions: (i) What are the current science teachers' instructional practices in German secondary school? (ii) What are the current…

The professional competencies pre-service geography teachers acquire in university influence their contribution to education for sustainable development (ESD) in their future school careers. We assessed pre-service geography teachers' (n = 100) competencies and attitudes towards the official, German ESD orientation framework to determine the…

Phosphates are essential components of any efficient fertilizer. Natural phosphate rock is, however, not available in every part of the world. According to the European Commission, phosphate rock has high economic importance as well as a certain supply risk--at least for Europe. For these reasons, environmental technology research has received a…

In a cross-sectional questionnaire study with N = 1045 German students between 13 and 18 years old (M = 14.1, SD = 0.6), we investigated the relation between students' cyber-bullying perpetration and victimization and their personal belief in a just world (BJW). We considered students' individual experience of teacher and classmate justice as…

This study examined the incremental validity of different information and communication technologies (ICT)-related person characteristics over and above intelligence and and prior achievement when predicting ICT literacy across a period of three years. Relative weights analyses were performed to determine the relative contribution of each…

The school context, like other influences, affects the development of students' epistemic beliefs (EBs), with theoretical conceptualizations suggesting a distinction between EBs related to professional and school science. However, empirical studies rarely address this distinction, and instruments separately assessing these EBs are not available.…

The development of the modern nation-state was an inherently centralising process. Education policy and the institutionalisation of mass public schooling played a key role in this process, facilitating industrialisation and the generation of mass loyalty toward the state. In almost all federal systems, however, education policy remained an…

Up to the publication of the results of Germany's first participation in the PISA study in 2001, there had been no national educational standards in Germany's 16 federal states. In the aftermath of the discussions about the disappointing outcomes, Germany's federal states decided to develop national standards, yet focusing on "core…

Although many scholars in the field of mathematics education are aware that identity discourses are highly political, research in the field usually lacks a framework theoretically and methodologically to address the political dimension of identity research. Based on Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory and the case of a female secondary school…

Purpose: PowerPoint presentations have changed representations of knowledge. They represent a social transformation process of communication which is also reflected in social-studies classrooms. Thus, it is important to examine not only how students hold presentations but also to explore the construction of knowledge through presentations: What…

Purpose: This article contains a reflection on researching in global citizenship education with a critical approach that aims to transcend the paradigm of methodological nationalism. Design/methodology/approach: Starting from outlining different dimensions of global citizenship (education), and looking at the current research situation in GCE, we…

Purpose: In youth, cross-sectional studies reported age differences in balance performance that were in favor of adolescents. Thus, trainability of balance performance might be different in children compared to adolescents. The purpose of this study was therefore to compare the effects of balance training (BT) on balance performance between…

The scarcity of research on speech perception among multilingual speakers precludes a full understanding of phonological acquisition in the third language (L3). In this controlled case study, we investigate L3 phonological acquisition in the perceptual domain and test the predictions of Perceptual Assimilation Model- L2 (Best & Tyler, 2007)…

This paper presents a case study that investigated students' perceptions on the integration of a socio-scientific issue into a general chemistry course at a public university located in northwestern California. The teaching intervention is based on a digital learning environment structured by the software Prezi that students used to explore the…