The present study investigated to what degree teachers' personality traits, cognitive abilities, and academic abilities (high school GPA), which were assessed at the end of high school as well as grades from the first and second state examinations of teacher education, predict later instructional quality. The study combined ratings of…

Over the last decades, teachers' self-efficacy beliefs have been widely investigated and defined as an overall construct. Recent studies indicate, however, that teachers' self-efficacy (TSE) beliefs vary depending on the individual student (so-called 'student-specific teacher self-efficacy', S-S TSE). Students' gender, their language background,…

This article describes a new competence-oriented teaching rationale for a science course, developed in Germany through close cooperation between teachers and researchers, that seeks to improve scientific literacy at upper-level secondary school (ages 15-17). Its aim is to help students become independent and competent experimenters by combining…

The relationships between RE leaders in Catholic education and their schools and their religious communities may be ambiguous. RE leaders often appear disconnected from both 'ordinary' teacher issues and 'ordinary' leadership issues because of their religious responsibilities. In this innovative research project, the authors have explored RE…

This study examines the influence of pupil and teacher characteristics on the diagnostic competence of teachers in the context of educational disadvantage in Germany. Congruent with the stereotype threat theory, it is expected that female gender and migration background will have a detrimental effect on the teacher assessment and that these…

Teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is highly important for effective design and implementation of school teaching. Thus, the current status, development and efficacy of this knowledge, its relationships with teaching quality parameters, and its impact on students' learning processes and success, require rigorous examination. Thoroughly…

This Special Issue aims to present evidence about the relationships between content knowledge (CK), pedagogical knowledge (PK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK); the development of these types of knowledge in novice and experienced secondary science teachers; and how CK, PK and/or PCK impact students' learning. Since Shulman's introduction…

To date, little has been known about teachers' success in bullying interventions. Thus, the present study analyzes how successfully teachers intervene in real bullying situations, based on an analysis of 1,996 reports by German students aged between 12 and 15 (49.2% female) from 24 schools. Predictors of success included intervention strategy…

A key challenge for teachers is the evaluation of teaching and learning situations in the classroom. Video-based instruments are considered as effective tools for measuring teachers' skills for evaluating classroom situations. This article reports the development and validation of a video-based assessment tool for measuring biology teachers'…

This article investigates how linguistic landscapes (LLs) can foster critical thinking about linguistic power relations and tensions in multilingual areas by acting as stimuli to reflect on the ethnolinguistic vitality of languages in a given region. We examine the pedagogical use of LLs as resources for the implementation of plurilingual…

The study presented in the paper has the following goals. The first is to review and compare teacher competence frameworks developed in Eastern (Chinese) and Western (German) contexts, exemplified for the domain of mathematics. Major similarities of the two contexts could be reconstructed in the conceptualization of teacher competence as a…

The present study examines future teachers' motivations for teaching using the FIT-Choice (Factors Influencing Teaching Choice) scale. The focus thereby is on subject interest, a factor that has rarely been accounted for by FIT-Choice studies although it is considered one of the most important factors to students for choosing teaching as a career.…

Using multiple representations and changing between them is at the heart of the mathematics classroom; unconnected changes can, however, be obstructive for students' learning. In order to support students' learning with multiple representations, teachers have to link observed situation aspects with relevant professional knowledge, a competence we…

Immigrant teachers face several specific expectations from policy makers, colleagues, as well as the media. Often new hopes are pinned on them for teaching (ethnically) diverse learners. Their professional identity is inevitably linked to these expectations. In this regard, this paper discusses the findings of a qualitative study exploring the…

It was recently proposed that teacher enthusiasm encompasses an experienced component as well as a behaviorally displayed component. Aiming to validate this proposition, the present study utilized lesson diaries to explore patterns of teacher-reported experienced enthusiasm and student-reported enthusiastic teaching behaviors and to investigate…