In Germany and Canada, the integration of immigrants into the labour market is closely related to the various approaches towards the recognition and validation of informal learning. This paper aims to analyse the informal learning measures undertaken by immigrants as well as those offered by employers in the health and information and…

Dimensional comparisons--i.e., comparisons between achievements in different domains--have to date been examined particularly between students' achievements in different school subjects. Numerous studies have documented that dimensional comparisons between mathematical and verbal achievements significantly affect students' mathematical and verbal…

At present, there are relatively few international studies that reflect research in religious didactics from a metatheoretical perspective. Against this background, the fundamental question of this contribution is whether there are research designs that are typical for research in religious didactics. For this purpose, research was conducted for a…

Teacher autonomy has been a topic of growing interest over recent decades. However, what teacher autonomy means remains work in progress. Drawing from existing conceptualisations, which consider teacher autonomy as a multidimensional and context-dependent phenomenon this paper presents an analytical device applicable in international comparative…

A number of studies have found evidence for the so-called "ambiguity advantage," that is, faster processing of ambiguous sentences compared with unambiguous counterparts. While a number of proposals regarding the mechanism underlying this phenomenon have been made, the empirical evidence so far is far from unequivocal. It is compatible…

In Germany enrolment in majors is of considerable interest to academic departments, because their budget depends on the number of enrolled students. Besides observed factors, we presume that unobserved latent variables influence the major-choice decision of students. Using stated preferences data from a discrete choice experiment among students…

Performance in elementary cognitive tasks is moderately correlated with fluid intelligence and working memory capacity. These correlations are higher for more complex tasks, presumably due to increased demands on working memory capacity. In accordance with the binding hypothesis, which states that working memory capacity reflects the limit of a…

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…

Behavioral research has shown that 12- but not 9-month-olds imitate an unusual and inefficient action (turning on a lamp with one's forehead) more when the model's hands are free. Rational-imitation accounts suggest that infants evaluate actions based on the rationality principle, that is, they expect people to choose efficient means to achieve a…

Dimensional comparisons are comparisons of one's accomplishments between two domains (e.g., comparisons between math and verbal achievements) that affect our self-perceptions in the domains compared with each other. In particular, dimensional comparisons explain the seemingly paradoxical finding, described in the internal/external frame of…

Funding is an important mechanism for exercising influence over ever more parts of academic systems. In order to do so, funding agencies attempt to export their functional and normative prerequisites for financing to new fields. One essential requirement for fundees is then to construct research processes in the form of a project beforehand, one…

Most current models of sentence comprehension assume that the human parsing mechanism (HPM) algorithmically computes detailed syntactic representations as basis for extracting sentence meaning. These models share the assumption that the representations computed by the HPM accurately reflect the linguistic input. This assumption has been challenged…

The present study investigates the processes of how German middle school students (age 14) interpret, contrast and evaluate different (informal) statistical measures in order to summarise and compare frequency distributions. To trace the developing insights into the properties of these measures, this paper uses the 'emergent modelling'…

This study investigates the relationships between professional knowledge, self-concept, and interest of pre-service physics teachers. In order to support student learning and interest development alike, teachers need a profound professional knowledge and respective motivational orientations. Developing both professional knowledge and motivational…

Generating information, compared to reading, improves learning and enhances long-term retention of the learned content. This so-called generation effect has been demonstrated repeatedly for recall and recognition of single words. However, before adopting generating as a learning strategy in educational contexts, conditions moderating the effect…