Background: Inquiry-based instruction is a prominent teaching strategy in science education that is assumed to be an effective means to foster not only students' understanding of science content but also their procedural and epistemic knowledge concerning inquiry processes. Empirical studies have repeatedly shown that inquiry-related activities…

This paper examines fundamental assumptions about the notion of transforming subject matter, which is widely regarded as a core practice of teacher work, a crucial feature of teacher knowledge and a measure of teacher expertise. First, the notion of transforming subject matter and the ways it has been taken up in Anglo-American discourses of…

In psychology programs, students should acquire both domain-specific knowledge and cross-domain competences important for later practice (e.g., multiple document literacy). Typically, such competences are trained "directly" in courses explicitly devoted to them or indirectly in courses on psychological topics that require them without…

Tasks are crucial for gaining access to powerful knowledge in geography and for fostering higher-order thinking in lessons; therefore, they are key to subject-specific pedagogy. After analysing tasks in geography textbooks for upper secondary education, it was revealed that higher-order thinking barely occurs in textbooks in the Netherlands and is…

The school context, like other influences, affects the development of students' epistemic beliefs (EBs), with theoretical conceptualizations suggesting a distinction between EBs related to professional and school science. However, empirical studies rarely address this distinction, and instruments separately assessing these EBs are not available.…

This study examines how academics and students from different disciplines perceive teaching and knowledge acquisition. University academics and students from both hard and soft disciplines completed the Domain-specific Epistemological Beliefs Questionnaire and the Approaches to Teaching Inventory. Results showed that academics held more…

The epistemological and educational philosophy of John Dewey is used as a theoretical basis to analyze processes of knowledge construction during geographical field studies. The experience of landscape drawing as a method of inquiry and a starting point for research-based learning is empirically evaluated. The basic drawing skills are acquired…

The aim of this paper is to search for possibilities to change the terms and content of conversations on colonial/decolonial human rights education. The content of conversations consists of what we know about human rights. The terms of conversations are the principles, assumptions, and rules of knowing in human rights education. The terms and…

How do students learn to explain? We take this exemplary research question for presenting two antagonist traditions in German mathematics education research and their synthesis in an ongoing video study. These two traditions are (1) the German Didaktik approach that can be characterized by its epistemologically sensitive analyses and…

Drawing on sequential and multimodal analysis of video-recorded classroom interactions, the paper examines in detail the interactional practices and verbal and bodily displays that serve to (re-)establish a congruency between the teacher's expectation with regard to the participants' relative knowledge and the students' actual knowledge claims. By…

The present article investigates the effects of epistemic beliefs (i.e. beliefs about the nature of knowledge and knowing) on the effectiveness of information literacy instruction (i.e. instruction on how to search for scholarly information in academic settings). We expected psychology students with less sophisticated beliefs (especially…

Most teachers hope to make a difference in the lives of their students, but whether they accomplish this with any regularity is often left unclear. With a topic like the Holocaust, the stakes are greatly raised. In this essay, the author discusses the place of the Holocaust in the liberal arts. He argues that the content of Holocaust education…

The study presented in this paper integrates data from four combined research studies, which are both qualitative and quantitative in nature. The studies describe freshman science student teachers' beliefs about teaching and learning. These freshmen intend to become teachers in Germany in one of four science teaching domains (secondary biology,…

Students (N = 101) used an introductory text and a computer simulation to learn fundamental concepts about statistical analyses (e.g., analysis of variance, regression analysis and General Linear Model). Each learner was randomly assigned to one cell of a 2 (with or without time advice) x 3 (with learning questions and corrective feedback, with…

This article focuses on the figure of the university teacher of literature, viewed as an agent that possesses knowledge and transmits it via its oral word. The approach is historical and theoretical. The first part examines how different types of teaching are linked to different phases of the development of the university institution, from the…