The current study investigates the effects of the school lockdowns during school years 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 on the achievement scores of primary school students during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed scores for spelling, reading fluency (i.e., decoding speed), reading comprehension, and mathematics from standardized student tracking systems…

The COVID-19 pandemic affected student well-being through measures such as closing educational institutions and social distancing, which forced universities to adapt the student learning environment. Previous research has demonstrated that the learning environment influences student well-being by satisfying their basic psychological needs of…

After the transition to university, students need to build a new peer network, which helps them to adapt to university life. This study investigated to what extent students' prosocial attitudes and academic achievement facilitate the embeddedness in friendship and help-seeking networks, while taking structural network characteristics into account.…

In any country, there is a group of students who are at risk of dropping out of school without any qualifications. This is detrimental for many of those students, because failure to graduate increases risks of unemployment and societal exclusion. To reduce this risk, specialized curricula aim to prepare these students for their working life by…

Differentiated instruction is considered to be an important teaching quality domain to address the needs of individual students in daily classroom practices. However, little is known about whether differentiated instruction is empirically distinguishable from other teaching quality domains in different national contexts. Additionally, little is…

The teacher-student relationship plays an important role in the academic and behavioral development of primary school children with externalizing problem behavior. However, such problem behavior often threatens the quality of the teacher-student relationship. Teacher-focused coaching intervention Key2Teach aims to improve elements of the…

This experimental study is aimed at examining the effect of involving pupils in primary education in setting assessment criteria and standards on their appraisal of a peer's work and their peer feedback style. It is expected that our intervention will lead to (1) a criteria-referenced appraisal and (2) more final vocabulary, which is associated…

Strategy flexibility, adaptivity, and the use of clever shortcut strategies are of major importance in current primary school mathematics education worldwide. However, empirical results show that primary school students use such shortcut strategies rather infrequently. The aims of the present study were to analyze the extent to which Dutch sixth…

Beliefs about knowledge have been found to relate to a variety of student outcomes and to vary across educational domains and instructional contexts. However, there are limited data on students' beliefs about information and truth, vis-à-vis knowledge (i.e., epistemic beliefs) and how these beliefs differ across instructional settings.…

Considering the pivotal role of academic adjustment for student success, it is important to gain insight into how several motivational and behavioural factors affect academic adjustment and the extent to which academic adjustment influences student success. This empirical study investigated how intrinsic motivation, academic self-efficacy,…

In educational theory, deep processing (i.e., connecting different study topics together) and self-regulation (i.e., taking control over one's own learning process) are considered effective learning strategies. These learning strategies can be influenced by the learning environment. Problem-based learning (PBL), a student-centered educational…

A cross-national comparison of degree programme levels became relevant when the borders of European countries opened for students and graduates, and higher education institutions were restructured into bachelor's and master's programmes. This new situation foregrounded the questions of what students are learning in the degree programmes of…

Since the 1970s, many observation instruments have been constructed to map teachers' general pedagogic competencies. However, few of these instruments focus on teachers' subject-specific competencies. This study presents the development of the "Framework for Analyzing the Teaching of Historical Contextualization" (FAT-HC). This…

Student performance is related to motivation to learn. As motivation generally declines during lower secondary education, one might expect performance to decline as well during this period. Though, until now, it has been unclear whether this pattern exists. In the present study, we examined student performance during the early years of secondary…

Historical reasoning competencies play an important role in history education. However, valid and reliable large-scale measurement instruments to assess these competencies are scarce. This study considers two instruments for measuring students' ability to perform historical perspective taking (HPT) as a historical reasoning competency. The…