In late modernity, discourses of optimization and acceleration dominate. The current debate on wellbeing is directly linked to this, as a good wellbeing in late modernism with an open ethical horizon can be seen as a positive point of reference for education. A good wellbeing is a prerequisite for being convinced with self-efficacy that life is to…

Recent studies in early mathematics education highlight the importance of patterning abilities and their influence on mathematics learning and the development of mathematical reasoning in young children. This paper focuses on young children's repeating patterning abilities and reports results from an ongoing four-year longitudinal study that…

This study examined conflictual interactions between adolescent girls and their mothers. Four levels of argumentation were distinguished according to theoretical notions about the development of adolescents' relationships with their mothers. It was assumed that in conflictual conversations with their mothers, adolescents express separation…

Features of everyday conceptions of a "wise person" were examined, based on a model of wisdom-related knowledge (Baltes & Smith, 1990). The goal was to examine whether the psychological theory underlying this model is consistent with lay conceptions of wisdom, and whether everyday conceptions contain additional features not contained…

Individuation is the process whereby adolescents gradually gain autonomy from their parents while maintaining emotional relatedness, accompanied by a transformation of the parent-child relationship. In everyday parent-child interactions, higher levels of individuation are displayed by characteristic styles of verbal exchanges, such as flexible…

This study identified and compared the preferred learning-style characteristics of German adolescents and analyzed the similarities and differences by age, gender, and academic achievement within and among groups of students in different educational settings. Participants were 869 German adolescents aged 13, 15, and 17 years old from grades 7…

It has been suggested (Youniss and Smollar, 1985) that the re-negotiation of the parent-adolescent relationship involves processes of separation and connectedness, with separation characterized, among other indicators, as the withdrawing of information by adolescents in order to establish territories that are unsupervised by the parents. This…

This study was conducted to examine how old and very old people cope with the difficult situations in their lives. The main goals of the study were to develop a measure for the identification of coping patterns in the old and very old, identify coping patterns, and investigate those patterns with respect to age and subjective well-being.…

Perceived causality for events seems to be age-related, the cognitive structures of older children being more complex. The influence of age on interpersonal perception was examined by comparing the preferred causal attributions of youngsters in grades 5-13 for teacher behavior. A pilot study produced eight explanations of teacher behavior: (1)…

Over the past 10 years, numerous empirical investigations of learning in physics have been carried out at the Institute of Physics Education (IPE) at the University of Bremen in Germany. The objectives of these investigations were: (1) to describe in detail individual learning processes; (2) to construct theoretical principles of individual…