The Home Learning Environment (HLE) focuses on everyday learning habits in families to support the development of children's early cognitive competencies. A growing number of studies have assessed the HLE by using different conceptual approaches and various assessment methods, often focusing on either the home literacy environment or the home…

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…

Teachers' emotional exhaustion is related to various detrimental outcomes, such as work absenteeism, intention to quit, impaired instructional quality, and lower student motivation. Since emotional exhaustion becomes evident as early as teacher training at university, the question is whether it would be possible to identify an individual…

Using the dual process theoretical framework (Brandtstädter & Rothermund, 2002), we examined whether the tendency to pursue goals tenaciously (TEN), in conjunction with the tendency to flexibly adjust one's preferences (FLEX), would be beneficial or detrimental for high school students' self-reported life satisfaction and achievement on tests…

Achievement emotions have received increasing attention in research on adolescence and young adulthood, but little is known about these emotions in the early years of schooling. Studies addressing the development of different achievement emotions and their linkages with achievement during these years are largely lacking. The present longitudinal…

Previous research provides evidence that ratings from students and external observers can deliver reliable and valid measures of teaching quality. However, there is still a lack of research on how stable these measures are across time and classes, which is particularly important when they are used for evaluations. We addressed this issue in 3…

Children in early childhood education and care (ECEC) spend a considerable amount of time interacting with their peers. However, open questions remain on whether and how children influence their peers' language development. The present study examined effects of peers' German receptive vocabulary (n = 1,871) on individual children's (n = 431)…

Mathematics anxiety is a problem for many secondary school students, and the accompanying worries and unpleasant affective reactions threaten their well-being. An extensive body of studies has found a negative correlation between anxiety and concurrent mathematics achievement. However, prior research on their longitudinal interplay has yielded…

Empirical studies have demonstrated that students who are taught in a group of students with higher average achievement benefit in terms of their achievement. However, there is also evidence showing that being surrounded by high-achieving students has a negative effect on students' academic self-concept, also known as the big-fish--little-pond…

Teachers' judgments of students' academic achievement are not only affected by the achievement themselves but also by several other characteristics such as ethnicity, gender, and minority status. In real-life classrooms, achievement and further characteristics are often confounded. We disentangled achievement, ethnicity and minority status and…

As schools are becoming more culturally diverse, it is crucial to understand how they can approach this diversity in ways that allow all students to feel included and do well. We focus on the manifestation of two related but distinct approaches to cultural diversity, namely "equality and inclusion" (i.e., promoting positive intergroup…

Children experience good and bad days in their performance. Although this phenomenon is well-known to teachers, parents, and students it has not been investigated empirically. We examined whether children's working memory performance varies systematically from day to day and to which extent fluctuations at faster timescales (i.e., occasions,…

In this study, we investigated effects of the proportion of language minority students in classrooms on the development of students' intrinsic motivation in language lessons and the mediating role of instructional climate (e.g., teacher support, focus on student interests). In addition, we explored the interaction between the proportion of…

Prior research has demonstrated that teachers' professional knowledge and motivation are strongly related to students' learning and motivation. Symptoms of teachers' stress and burnout (e.g., emotional exhaustion) are also thought to influence students' achievement, but no empirical study has tested this prediction. Using multilevel analyses and a…

The main goals of this study were to test whether multiple representations, such as diagrams and equations, per se help to acquire conceptual understanding in probability, and to investigate whether learners need instructional support to utilize the potentials of multiple representations. The authors conducted an experimental study with 8…