Many teachers strive for lively student participation in class. This field study examined aspects of learning environments in higher education with regard to their connection with students' oral engagement. Overall, six factors that might increase or decrease oral participation were investigated: the number of teacher questions, course atmosphere,…

Most chemistry students struggle with interpreting and understanding NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) spectra and the general concepts of NMR spectroscopy. NMR spectroscopy seems to be difficult to both teach and learn. Therefore, the corresponding courses should be investigated in more detail. We conducted a survey with N = 39 German university…

The social sciences increasingly utilize film as a teaching tool. This is reflected by a growing amount of publications on the topic, which are predominantly reporting positive results. Incorporating the medium seems to allow for more adaptive and engaging ways of teaching. Judging from the existing literature, however, its application in the…

Initial teacher education is the main opportunity to prepare pre-service preschool teachers to foster young children's science competences. Although initial teacher education is important for preschool teachers' later instruction in practice, little is known about early science education in initial teacher education. To gather first insights into…

Teaching multilingual learning groups is an important part of the professional activity of primary teachers in Germany, placing high demands on their occupational professionalism. The aim of this article is to analyse the effects of educational and occupational influencing factors on the beliefs of teachers regarding multilingualism as a facet of…

While a large body of research addresses both subject choice and student dropout in higher education, much less is known about switching the initially chosen major. Therefore, we ask why students switch their major in higher education and analyse this for the case of Germany, taking the timing and the degree of such switches (within and across…

In initial teacher education (ITE), preservice teachers acquire declarative knowledge in different knowledge domains: general pedagogy, content, and pedagogical content. To investigate how they use this knowledge in a school-related situation, n = 56 preservice teachers were asked to evaluate a peer's fictitious lesson plan. Their comments were…

The focus of this paper is the affective dimension of far-right discourses which we consider challenges for teaching. The rise of the far-right in many parts of the world has led to a growing body of work in the social sciences. However, as the topic has become the subject of academic scrutiny its controversial nature also demands a debate on…

Laypeople are increasingly confronted with scientific controversies, as science concerns many aspects of everyday life. In the present study, we investigated how epistemic beliefs regarding the uncertainty of knowledge (i.e. uncertainty beliefs) and invested mental effort during task processing contribute to how individuals evaluate scientific…

Recent approaches to statistics education situate the teaching and learning of statistics within cycles of statistical inquiry. Learners pose questions, plan, and collect, represent, analyse and interpret data. We focus on the first step -- posing statistical questions. Posing statistical questions is a critical step as questions inform the types…

This article advocates for the inclusion of queer and queer of color discourse into graduate curricula in North American German Studies. It presents a brief overview of major discussions in queer of color studies, proposes sample readings of queer of color texts in Germany that help graduate students develop sophisticated understandings of German…

This study explored relationships between Internet-specific justification beliefs and source evaluation and corroboration during Web search. Fifty university students completed the Internet-Specific Epistemic Justification Inventory (ISEJ), which targeted beliefs concerning the justification of Internet-based knowledge claims about natural science…

Teaching simulations such as scriptwriting tasks offer a novel way to support pre-service teachers in gaining diagnostic competencies and in guiding students to work through difficulties. We first report on the theory-driven development of a scriptwriting task, specifically the theoretically-founded language- and accompanying content-related…

Aim/Purpose: Academics are often requested to create and teach courses for emerging technologies with perhaps no experience or guidance on how to do so. Background: A Framework to develop IT courses for emerging technologies was created and tested to assist academics; the framework was then tested by developing an IoT course. Methodology: A…

Due to content-based analysis of marketing specialists' professional training and approaches to development of their educational trajectory, it has been revealed that curricula and their content are given much attention by employers whose demands are focused on meeting current labour market conditions. It has been justified that despite the…