Despite the substantial efforts made by higher education institutions to reduce dropout rates, a considerable proportion of students still discontinues their initial study program. In view of this situation, the present study aims to investigate whether participation in first-year courses for personal and academic support goes along with a…

Because large-scale studies repeatedly indicated low reading literacy for many students, a need for interventions fostering reading literacy, such as extracurricular tutoring, has often been emphasized. Several reading promoting programs, suitable for extracurricular tutoring, were developed and shown to be effective in recent years. Moreover,…

Use of digital learning tools (DLTs) in classrooms has markedly increased since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Concerns exist that some DLTs were integrated without careful consideration of their impacts on student motivation to learn and/or academic achievement. Moreover, differences in student demographic profiles and the learning environment may…

There is much anecdotal evidence of the benefits of fieldwork, but a small amount of research has been carried out on the value of fieldwork for student learning. Existing studies have focused on analysing fieldwork in mostly disciplinary and national contexts and the effects of interdisciplinary fieldwork on student learning have not been fully…

A comprehensive understanding of why feedback benefits some students and not others is still lacking. We performed latent profile analysis of students' receptivity to instructional feedback (RIF) in a sample of 1800 secondary school students from Germany (age: M = 16.37, SD = 1.47). We described RIF profiles, predicted profile membership using…

Longitudinal research on students' interest in higher education showed that interest declines throughout the study program. While researchers reported numerous factors explaining interest on the student level, research on the relationship between the lecturer level and students' interest development is considered scarce. This study aimed to…

Private supplementary tutoring is a widespread phenomenon. However, evidence that private tutoring has positive effects on academic achievement or about the specific conditions of successful private tutoring is rare. Adapting Carroll's (1963) model for school learning to private tutoring, we expected to find positive effects of tutoring duration,…

The tremendous growth in electronic educational data creates the need to have meaningful information extracted from it. Educational Data Mining (EDM) is an exciting research area that can reveal valuable knowledge from educational databases. This knowledge can be used for many purposes, including identifying dropouts or weak students who need…

It is often assumed by implication that the reasons why teacher education students drop out of their degree courses are different to those in other study programmes. However, based on research on other differences, there is reason to assume that the subject being studied is important, and especially its affiliation to STEM (Science, Technology,…

International student mobility (ISM) is considered increasingly important for professional careers. Referring to theories of human capital and job market signalling, we assume that different forms of ISM experience can serve as signals for general, specific and transnational human capital. To test this idea, we use a factorial survey experiment to…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to determine whether students' self-assessment (SSA) could be used as a significant attribute to predict students' future academic achievement. Design/methodology/approach: The authors address how well students can assess their abilities and study the relationship between this ability and demographic…

Dual Language programs are starting to resurface amongst the best practices for increasing literacy and academic language acquisition. Substantial evidence exists to support dual language (DL) education as a viable and enriching method of supporting high levels of academic achievement for both English Language Learners (ELLs) and English-speaking…

Teachers play a key role in the development of self-regulated learning (SRL), especially in primary education. However, current results indicate that teachers are either inadequately or only moderately fulfilling this key function, as they spend little time in the instruction of SRL strategies. The objective of the current study was, therefore, to…

Empirically rigorous research on teacher education entry is extremely limited. Evidence on who enters teacher education and why is crucial for identifying undesired gaps in entry and can assist with teacher recruitment. Grounded in prior research, we identified four primary groups of relevant individual-level variables: student/family background,…

Studies have shown the potential of explainer videos. An alternative is a written explanation, as found in science textbooks. Prior research suggests that instructional explanations sometimes lead to the belief that a topic has been fully understood, even though that is, not the case. This 'illusion of understanding' may be affected by the medium…