University examinations categorise students according to their individual achievements determined by teaching staff. This procedure serves the elicitation and certification of student knowledge and thus reproduces academic hierarchies. Drawing on empirical evidence from ethnographic fieldwork in Engineering and History departments, this article…

Integrating literacy in science and mathematics learning and teaching has been an ongoing endeavour. There are frameworks developed to guide teachers' practices, but little is reported on assessing literacy simultaneously with scientific or mathematical content knowledge. We reviewed the literature on assessing literacy in science and mathematics…

Problem solving is considered an essential ability for becoming an expert in physics, and individualized feedback on the structure of problem-solving processes is a key component to support students in developing this ability. Problem-solving processes consist of multiple elements whose order forms the sequential structure of these processes.…

The COVID-19 pandemic put academic institutions around the world in the difficult position of suddenly having to organize many lectures and examinations over online channels only, due to students' physical access to their campus buildings being restricted. While the search for possible solutions to this problem was often challenging, this…

Comparison is an important geographic method and a common task in geography education. Mastering comparison is a complex competency and written comparisons are challenging tasks both for students and assessors. As yet, however, there is no set test for evaluating comparison competency nor tool for enhancing it. Moreover, little is known about…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate how physical education teachers analyze their students' swimming skills. Particular attention is given to information gathering within the diagnostic process. Methods: Data were collected from a quantitative online survey of German physical education teachers from primary and secondary schools (n = 551).…

Formative assessment is about providing and using feedback and diagnostic information. On this basis, further learning or further teaching should be adaptive and, in the best case, optimized. However, this aspect is difficult to implement in reality, as teachers work with a large number of students and the whole process of formative assessment,…

Computational thinking (CT) is seen as a key competence of the 21st century and different countries have started to integrate it into their compulsory school curricula. However, few indications exist on how to assess CT in compulsory school. This review analyses what tools are used to assess CT in European schools and which dimensions are…

Lockdowns imposed by many countries on their populations at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis forced teachers to adapt quickly and without adequate preparation to distance teaching. In this paper, we focus on one of the most formidable challenges that teachers faced during the lockdowns and even in the post-lockdown emergency period, namely,…

We investigated how students' strategic knowledge about situational (pictorial) drawings and mathematical (schematic) drawings affects drawing accuracy and modeling competencies in the domain of geometry. We conducted a pre-posttest experimental study with 473 students in grade 9. Students were randomly assigned to one of three treatment…

In this quasi-experimental study, we investigated whether basic arithmetic skills and mathematical self-concept of young children can be influenced by feedback during an interactive session in which a game was played. German 5- to 7-year-old children (n = 79) played an adaption of the game House of Numbers six times, either in a specific or an…

We investigated how evaluation standards employed in performance tests affect the impact of performance goals (here focused on appearance) on academic cheating. Thereby, we assumed that appearance goals would lead to increased cheating only if students' performance was presumably evaluated based on results rather than on the strategies they…

Changes in the economy and society lead to a growing necessity of financial education. In this context, we investigate the approaches to financial education in secondary schools in the United States and Germany. We seek to answer the question if and how the implementation of financial education is similar and different between the two countries.…

In this chapter, we analyse the practices and attitudes of German teachers regarding assessment of refugee students learning Spanish or English as foreign languages. The data were collected through interviews with ten Spanish or English teachers dealing with refugee students in their classrooms in secondary schools in Hamburg in 2017 (Thölkes,…

Multimodality is implemented to the modern learning environment in line with trends towards multidisciplinarity. In the current study, multimodal interaction is based on the mutual integration of understanding of multimodality in philological and pedagogical perspectives. The purpose of the article was to analyze and compare the results of…