Research on the big-fish-little-pond effect demonstrates that class-average achievement negatively affects students' academic self-concept via social comparison processes. The neighborhood-effects literature reports positive effects of advantageous socioeconomic neighborhood conditions on students' academic development via collective socialization…

To promote pro-environmental behavior (PEB), it is crucial to understand the drivers behind it. Studies indicate that, in addition to environmental attitudes and nature activities, interest in nature drives people to engage in PEB. However, the relationship between interest in nature and PEB is still greatly understudied among adolescents even…

Hands-on activities are considered to be particularly suitable for generating long-term knowledge that increases environmentally friendly behaviour. Appropriate flagship species in a respective curricular context can enable high-quality education. We have developed a teaching concept and material for hands-on activities with bumblebees. This…

The relation between prior knowledge and learning has been investigated in many studies. However, a recent meta-analysis showed that most of these studies suffered from serious methodological shortcomings, as they failed to account for knowledge growth over time, possible ceiling effects for learners with high prior knowledge, moderating effects…

Previous studies pointed out that dealing with difficult behaviour is perceived by teachers as a major challenge in inclusive settings. However, research on the students' perception of the classroom behavioural climate (CBC) is rare. Therefore, this study aims to examine students' perceptions of CBC and to identify predictors of CBC as well as…

This study investigates the capacity of children to develop map-based skills in spatial orientation in an urban environment unknown to them. In this quantitative study, a total of 328 pupils of grades 3-5 had to achieve specific skills with regard to map-based skills in spatial orientation (such as turning-off skills, transformation from map to…

Until now, many efforts in the area of environmental education, intended to instill consciously responsible behaviour into the general public in Germany, have failed. Several of the available intervention studies aimed at improving environmental behaviour of pupils with classroom tuition were able to show positive results, but there were often…

In line with previous studies, where outdoor nature experience was shown to support adolescents' environmental knowledge, our study monitored the influence of a hands-on environmental programme within a National Park on cognitive knowledge achievement. A sample of 4th and 5th graders (n = 289) completed a week-long outreach conservation programme…

Coping research has consistently shown that accommodative coping is positively correlated with individuals' health. Until now, however, there have been little to no studies on the prognostic impact of accommodative coping on health, and only a few studies investigating its buffering effect on the relation between stress and health in childhood and…

Socially desirable responses have been widely discussed as potentially biasing self-reported measures of environmental attitude and behaviour assessment. The direct and moderating effect of social desirability on children has not been analysed before. By applying a Lie scale together with a two-factor environmental attitude set measure and a scale…

The relevance of environmental attitudes is obvious and attitudes towards farm and companion animals and animal welfare in medical research are an important aspect of education. However, both have rarely been linked with each other, and animal attitudes are only sparsely represented within environmental education assessment instruments. Linking…

Positive socioemotional outcomes and developments represent important educational goals. Full-time ability grouping of gifted students has been criticized for potentially detrimental socioemotional effects. Therefore, in the present longitudinal study, we investigated whether or not social self-concepts and school-related attitudes and beliefs are…

Recent handbooks of giftedness or expertise propose a plethora of conceptions on the development of excellent performance but, to our knowledge, there are no comparative studies that provide empirical evidence of their validity to guide researchers and practitioners in their adoption of a particular conception. This study sought to close that gap…

Lesson Study can be viewed as a continuous development programme because it offers teachers support in an environment unlike other traditional continuous development programmes. In this study, 28 primary mathematics teachers were surveyed and 4 out of the 28 were interviewed to examine how they perceived Lesson Study as professional development.…

This study investigated adolescents' developmental trajectories of mathematics interest and explored related effects of gender, family, and school context. Latent growth curve modeling was used to analyze longitudinal data of N = 3,193 students (51% female) from grades 5 to 9 from all 3 ability tracks of the German state school system. Annual…