Energy is a central concept across the sciences and an important goal of science education is to support all students so that they develop a full understanding of the energy concept. However, given the abstract and complex nature of the energy concept, only a few students develop an understanding so that they can use energy ideas to make sense of…

For biology students, the diversity, complexity, and abundance of content in this field yield a heavy study load. Hence, appropriate learning strategies are key in supporting learners' academic success. In biology, the factors gender and interest hold a unique position within the natural sciences, as there is an academic imbalance to the…

A positive academic self-concept (ASC) relates to many desirable educational outcomes. Research on which student characteristics relate to the formation of ASC is therefore crucial. To examine the importance of personality for ASC, we investigated the relation between Big Five traits and mean level as well as within-person variability in state…

To obtain a general understanding of science, model use as part of National Education Standards is important for instruction. Model use can be characterized by three aspects: (1) the characteristics of the model, (2) the integration of the model into instruction, and (3) the use of models to foster scientific reasoning. However, there were no…

Prior research has found that student achievement is positively related to students' social standing in class. However, negative stereotypes about high academic achievers prevail among secondary school students, suggesting that higher achievers might be less well-integrated socially. These stereotypes especially target academically high-achieving…

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has become an essential issue for schools facing major challenges such as bridging the knowledge-action-gap. Interactive simulations could help to focus on action-oriented learning. As part of a design-based research (DBR) process, we investigated the learning potential of game elements within a digital…

Students with high reading proficiency typically achieve better results in science assessments, indicating the importance of reading proficiency. Since the process of reading is a complex interaction between properties of a text and a reader, the linguistic demands of a text might affect text comprehension. Certain linguistic features, such as…

The inconsistency task is used to measure metacognitive monitoring in text comprehension via online (reading time) and offline measures (number of detected inconsistencies). Few studies have examined stability in task performance and interindividual differences. We addressed these issues with adolescents (N = 341) in Grades 6/7 (Mage =…

We investigated how students' strategic knowledge about situational (pictorial) drawings and mathematical (schematic) drawings affects drawing accuracy and modeling competencies in the domain of geometry. We conducted a pre-posttest experimental study with 473 students in grade 9. Students were randomly assigned to one of three treatment…

In order to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, many schools have been closed for several months as of March 2020 in Germany. The unplanned and rapid shift to distance learning formats has led to fears that extensive learning deficits will be created and educational inequality will be further exacerbated. This paper, therefore, investigates the…

Many students suffer from motivational problems when doing homework. To investigate whether an intervention that effectively promoted value beliefs in mathematics promoted students' homework motivation and behavior, we analyzed data from a cluster randomized controlled study with two classroom-based relevance interventions (writing a text or…

Students' argumentation skills are considered a central tool to contribute to scientific controversies in the science classroom. Scientific controversies of social relevance (socioscientific issues; SSI) are subject to multiple viewpoints that are often rooted in diverse disciplines. However, the relationship between issue familiarity and…

Disruptive student behavior is a frequent part of school life, most often shown by male students and related to many negative academic outcomes. In this study, we examined the psychological benefits of engaging in disruptive behavior for low-achieving students from an attributional perspective. In an experimental vignette study of 178 ninth…

Background: Concerning students' difficulties with fractions, many explanatory approaches are based on the distinction between conceptual knowledge and procedural knowledge. For further research in this field, it is thus crucial to make these constructs accessible to valid measurement. Aims: In this study, we aim at developing a test instrument…

While school self-concept is an important facilitator of a student's school engagement, previous studies rarely investigated whether it may also explain the change in students' school engagement during secondary school. Moreover, as social relations play an increasingly important role in adolescence, the current research distinguishes between the…