International student mobility has increased in the past years. The inclusion of a highly heterogeneous group of students requires updated recruitment and admission strategies. A particularly vulnerable group of international students are refugees, who have an exceptionally high risk of dropping out of their studies. We present an entrance…

University lecturers and coordinators of business and economics courses around the world are faced with the challenge that beginning students in these courses have heterogeneous entry conditions in terms of personal characteristics. This article focuses on the economic knowledge of German and Japanese beginning students in a business and economics…

In view of cross-national student mobility and increasing internationalization of the labor market, a common understanding of economic concepts as well as awareness for country-specific factors influencing economics education is essential. Therefore, the development of instruments that allow for comparable investigation across countries is…

According to teaching-learning theories, interventions in educational practice require a valid diagnosis of students' learning preconditions. Cognitive dispositions at the beginning of studies are the strongest predictor of knowledge acquisition. In the context of increasing numbers of beginning students with heterogeneous preconditions, valid…

In this study, we examine the knowledge of students in a master program in business and economics and explore whether migration-specific influences can be determined. We tested the knowledge of 1,451 students from 40 universities in Germany in the content areas of accounting, finance, and microeconomics. Migration background had a significant…

In this study we examine the determinants of and the relationship among economic knowledge, epistemological beliefs, and extrinsic and intrinsic motivation over the course of undergraduate studies in a sample of students of business and economics at a university in Germany. We found economic knowledge increased over the course of studies,…

In this article, the authors present the findings of a pretest-posttest measurement of the economic knowledge of students in introductory economics courses in undergraduate study programs in Germany. The responses of 403 students to 14 items selected from the "Test of Economic Literacy" (Soper and Walstad 1987) were analyzed to identify…

Gender effects in large-scale assessments have become an increasingly important research area within and across countries. Yet few studies have linked differences in assessment results of male and female students in higher education to construct-relevant features of the target construct. This paper examines gender effects on students' economic…

Study-related prior knowledge plays a decisive role in business and economics degree courses. Prior knowledge has a significant influence on knowledge acquisition in higher education, and teachers need information on it to plan their introductory courses accordingly. Very few studies have been conducted of first-year students' prior economic…