Thin slices ratings (i.e., ratings based on first impressions) have yielded intriguingly accurate results in various domains. Among other, researcher have applied the thin slices technique to assess instructional quality, showing that teacher-student interactions can be reliably inferred by just very short snippets of classroom instruction. The…

Our study aims to provide empirical evidence for and against the valid use of primary school students' ratings of three generic dimensions of teaching quality (classroom management, supportive climate, cognitive activation). We examine whether students discriminate between corresponding dimensions in different subjects, taking into account whether…

Introduction: This article describes the development of an Aggression and Restriction Observation Checklist (AROC) for use in residential and in-patient services for adults with intellectual disabilities (ID). The AROC was developed in collaboration between researchers and frontline staff. It assesses self-, person-, and object-directed aggressive…

This article proposes a study design developed to disentangle the objective characteristics of a learning situation from individuals' subjective perceptions of that situation. The term objective characteristics refers to the agreement across students, whereas subjective perceptions refers to inter-individual heterogeneity. We describe a novel…

The elicited imitation task (EIT), in which language learners listen to a series of spoken sentences and repeat each one verbatim, is a commonly used measure of language proficiency in second language acquisition research. The "TOEFL® Essentials"™ test includes an EIT as a holistic measure of speaking proficiency, referred to as the…

In this research report, we describe the design and empirical findings for a large-scale study of essay writing ability with approximately 2,500 high school students in Germany and Switzerland on the basis of 2 tasks with 2 associated prompts, each from a standardized writing assessment whose scoring involved both human and automated components.…

Students' and pre-service teachers' conceptions of scientists have been assessed in a variety of studies. One of the most commonly used instruments is the Draw-A-Scientist Test (DAST) which offers the advantage that no verbal skills are needed by the participants. In some studies, methodical challenges related to the DAST have been discussed; for…

Approximately a third of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) items in the core domains (math, reading, and science) are constructed-response items and require human coding (scoring). This process is time-consuming, expensive, and prone to error as often (a) humans code inconsistently, and (b) coding reliability in…

School inspections have become an important instrument of quality assurance and quality development in many European countries. So far, the focus of empirical research on school inspections has been on the acceptance of the procedure among the school-internal actors, its influence for internal quality development and its effects on student…

With regard to the moderate performance of German students in international large-scale assessments, one branch of German science education research is concerned with the construction and evaluation of competence models. Based on the theory-driven definition of competence levels, these models imply a correlation between the complexity of a…

The inter-rater reliability of university students' evaluations of teaching quality was examined with cross-classified multilevel models. Students (N = 480) evaluated lectures and seminars over three years with a standardised evaluation questionnaire, yielding 4224 data points. The total variance of these student evaluations was separated into the…

Scholastic tests regard cognitive abilities to be domain-specific competences. However, high correlations between competences indicate either high task similarity or a dependence on common factors. The present rating study examined the validity of 12 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Third or Trends in International…

When entering the classroom, adolescents already hold various conceptions on science topics. Concept maps may function as useful tools to reveal such conceptions although labor-intensive analysis often prevents application in typical classroom situations. The authors aimed to provide teachers with an appropriate approach to analyze students'…

An international comparative research project was carried out in the Netherlands, Wales, Germany and Finland to understand how trainee teachers reflect upon play. Data was collected among 31 Dutch, 37 Welsh, 40 German and 19 Finnish teacher trainees. They watched four videotaped sequences of preschoolers engaged in an activity. Next, they answered…

A considerable body of research has examined the association between self-presentation on social networking sites and personality in adults. Yet, there is a lack of corresponding research on adolescents as well as studies on alternative measures of personality traits of the self. The current study investigates, using a cross-sectional multi-method…