Regionality as a formative characteristic of religion-related education in Germany, Switzerland and Austria is the focus of the current project 'Models of Religious Education and the topic of Islam' ('MORE'). The project compares four different regional variants of religion-related education that are assigned to two competing models,…

Stereotypical assumptions associating high levels of giftedness and outstanding performance with maladaptive behavioral characteristics and personality traits (cf. disharmony stereotype) are rather prevalent in the school context as well as in the musical domain. Such preconceptions among teachers can influence student assessment and corresponding…

The purpose of our study was to investigate a health-related PETE program on two levels: 1) the health-related PCK of PE student teachers participating in the PETE program and 2) the changes in HKU of female pupils participating in the PE lessons developed throughout the PETE program. To study the PCK of the PE student teachers, we conducted a…

Previous studies from German-speaking areas of Europe could not prove any substantial development in the competences and the pedagogical content knowledge of prospective history teachers during teacher training, and thus could not empirically confirm the effectiveness of teacher education. We report on the theoretical framework and the results of…

This research addresses lexical deficits among EFL learners by investigating the pedagogical potential of vocal training with authentic pop songs for multi-word unit acquisition. Drawing on cognitive neuroscience, the study builds on evidence that music enhances brain plasticity and that musical and linguistic syntax share neural processing…

Background: Achievement goals and self-efficacy are key components of teacher motivation and crucial for teaching quality and student outcomes, yet the processes explaining why they lead to specific teaching behaviours remain unclear. This study focuses on student-oriented goals as a potential process element and construct in its own right. Aims:…

Technology may promote student engagement in high-level learning processes in the classroom. Yet, whether teachers really exploit technology's potential to support student learning depends on their expertise. The authors compared pre-service and technology-experienced in-service teachers' reasoning about technology-enhanced lessons by means of…

Initial teacher education is the main opportunity to prepare pre-service preschool teachers to foster young children's science competences. Although initial teacher education is important for preschool teachers' later instruction in practice, little is known about early science education in initial teacher education. To gather first insights into…

This paper examines the role of professionalism in teachers' change in practice related to dialogue and argumentation. Data were collected from 14 pre-primary and primary school teachers who participated in a professional development programme with an emphasis on promoting values such as tolerance, empathy, inclusion and social responsibility…

In this article, we analyse pre-service language teachers' written plans for demonstration lessons in Germany. Our objective is to reconstruct and quantify generic and subject-specific planning decisions related to adaptive teaching, specified as the ways in which a lesson's main task fits the learning group's cognitive level. The focus is on…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to arrest an ongoing didactisation of teaching leading to the disappearance of the original content of knowledge. Design/methodology/approach: Teaching can only be understood within its inner logic by exploring the individual expression of pedagogical practice in three dimensions: education, formation…

In initial teacher education (ITE), preservice teachers acquire declarative knowledge in different knowledge domains: general pedagogy, content, and pedagogical content. To investigate how they use this knowledge in a school-related situation, n = 56 preservice teachers were asked to evaluate a peer's fictitious lesson plan. Their comments were…

Comparative education scholars are often sceptical of teaching effectiveness research that compares 'teaching quality' using systematic classroom observation systems across nations. This article investigates how three international observation systems designed for comparative use, and studies that apply them, attend to three concerns intrinsic to…

This paper introduces and summarises a programme of German research into teaching started 20 years ago. This research draws on Herbart's analysis of teaching with its focus on 'Bildung' (formation) which is distinguished from the measurement/psychometric tradition. It offers the possibilities of a deeper empirical understanding of pedagogical…

It is broadly admitted that social contexts of reasoning may prompt children and adolescents to improve the quality of their reasoning. However, it is not clear how this quality may be assessed when it comes to arguments expressed within oral interactions in diverse settings (whole-class or small-group discussions) by students of different ages…