Editorial: Kompetenzmodelle zur Erfassung individueller Lernergebnisse und zur Bilanzierung von Bildungsprozessen

This special issue comprises eleven articles from the DFG priority program “Competence Models for Assessing Individual Learning Outcomes and Evaluating Educational Processes”. The special issue aims at showing the priority program’s present state of discussion concerning essential concepts and questions related to the modeling of competencies. The first article describes the structure and research areas of the program and gives an overview on the current state of research. The short articles two to eleven discuss questions and problems which proved to be of particular importance during the work of the priority program in the last years. These articles constitute the result of a workshop of the participating scientists of the priority program in terms of position papers.     

Framework for Empirical Research on Science Teaching and Learning

In view of the research on education—and subject-related education in particular—that has been conducted in recent years, it would seem useful to describe the current state and future trends of research on science teaching and learning. In the present article, research findings are described, the deficits of science education are analyzed, and medium- and long-term research goals are specified from the perspective of an interdisciplinary cooperative effort between specialists in the fields of empirical educational research; the psychology of learning and instruction; and biology, chemistry, and physics education. Revised and supplemented version of Fischer, H. E., Klemm, K., Leutner, D., Sumfleth, E., Tiemann, R., and Wirth, J. (2003). Naturwissenschaftsdidaktische Lehr-Lernforschung: Defizite und Desiderata [Natural science-didactical learning research: Deficits and desiderata]. Zeitschrift für Didaktik der Naturwissenschaften, 9, 179–208.     

Wie lässt sich die Experimentierstrategie-Nutzung fördern?

Pupils display a production deficiency within self-regulated learning arrangements using experimentation. Available strategy-knowledge does not result in an effective strategy use. This may be due to a lack of metacognitive capabilities and motivation. These aspects should be supported, then, in order to foster strategy use. Providing prompts is a promising method. The question is how to design them to optimal effect. Two characteristics were investigated in an experimental study, namely the adaptability of prompts and their combination with strategy-related feedback. 93 pupils in year 9 experienced self-regulated learning in a computer-based experiment setting. There was a control group and three experimental groups with non-adaptive prompts, adaptive prompts or a combination of feedback and adaptive prompts, respectively. The dependent variables were the extent of using a strategy for experimentation and pupils’ motivation. Benefits for use of strategy were only observed for the group with a combination of feedback and adaptive prompts. The learners in this group remained also more strongly motivated than in the other groups.     

When Do Pictures Help Learning from Expository Text? Multimedia and Modality Effects in Primary Schools

Adding pictures to a text is very common in today’s education and might be especially beneficial for elementary school children, whose abilities to read and understand pure text have not yet been fully developed. Our study examined whether adding pictures supports learning of a biology text in fourth grade and whether the text modality (spoken or written) plays a role. Results indicate that overall, pictures enhanced learning but that the text should be spoken rather than written. These results are in line with instructional design principles derived from common multimedia learning theories. In addition, for elementary school children, it might be advisable to read texts out to the children. Reading by themselves and looking at pictures might overload children’s cognitive capacities and especially their visual channel. In this case, text and pictures would not be integrated into one coherent mental model, and effective learning would not take place.     

Science text comprehension: Drawing, main idea selection, and summarizing as learning strategies

The purpose of two experiments was to contrast instructions to generate drawings with two text-focused strategies—main idea selection (Exp. 1) and summarization (Exp. 2)—and to examine whether these strategies could help students learn from a chemistry science text. Both experiments followed a 2 × 2 design, with drawing strategy instructions (yes vs. no) and main idea/summarization strategy instructions (yes vs. no) as experimental factors. The main dependent variable was science text comprehension, measured by a multiple-select test and a transfer test. Participants were 90 (Exp. 1) and 71 (Exp. 2) students (grade 10). The results of both experiments showed positive effects of the drawing strategy instructions and negative effects of the text-focused strategy instructions without interactions. These results are consistent with the mental model approach to comprehension, showing advantages of drawing activity in fostering science text comprehension.     

Kompetenzmodellierung: Struktur,Konzepte und Forschungszugänge des DFG-Schwerpunktprogramms

The assessment and modeling of competencies plays a key role in optimizing educational processes and improving educational systems. The DFG priority program “Competence Models for Assessing Individual Learning Outcomes and Evaluating Educational Processes” which was founded in 2007, aims at promoting and coordinating the scientific efforts in this field across disciplines. The present article describes the structure, concepts and research approaches and sketches the current state of research of the priority program.     

Drawing pictures during learning from scientific text: testing the generative drawing effect and the prognostic drawing effect

Does using a learner-generated drawing strategy (i.e., drawing pictures during reading) foster students' engagement in generative learning during reading? In two experiments, 8th-grade students (Exp. 1: N = 48; Exp. 2: N = 164) read a scientific text explaining the biological process of influenza and then took two learning outcome tests. In Experiment 1, students who were asked to draw pictures during reading (learner-generated drawing group), scored higher than students who only read (control group) on a multiple-choice comprehension test (d = 0.85) and on a drawing test (d = 1.15). In Experiment 2, students in the learner-generated drawing group scored significantly higher than the control group on both a multiple-choice comprehension test (d = 0.52) and on a drawing test (d = 1.89), but students who received author-generated pictures in addition to drawing or author-generated pictures only did not. Additionally, the drawing-accuracy scores during reading correlated with comprehension test scores (r = .623, r = .470) and drawing scores (r = .620, r = .615) in each experiment, respectively. These results provide further evidence for the generative drawing effect and the prognostic drawing effect, thereby confirming the benefits of the learner-generated drawing strategy.     

Die Bedeutung des pädagogisch-psychologischen Wissens für die Qualität der Klassenführung und den Lernzuwachs der Schüler/innen im Physikunterricht

In the present study it was investigated whether the pedagogical knowledge of teachers has an influence on the process quality of physics instruction and on the learning achievement of students as well. Pedagogical knowledge, conceptualized as knowledge about strategies in classroom instruction that is domain-general and relevant for teaching behaviors, was measured using a paper-and-pencil test with two scales: one scale on declarative knowledge, the other on conditional-procedural knowledge (Lenske et al. 2015). As a basic aspect of the process quality of classroom instruction, classroom management was assessed using video ratings of two lessons from each participating teacher. Students’ learning achievement was assessed using standardized domain-specific knowledge tests in a pretest-posttest design. The sample included 34 teachers from higher-track secondary schools and their students (N?=?993). A complex bootstrapping mediation model shows that teachers’ pedagogical knowledge, mediated by their classroom management, has a positive effect on their students’ learning achievement.     

Assessment of Cognitive Load in Multimedia Learning with Dual-Task Methodology: Auditory Load and Modality Effects

Using cognitive load theory and cognitivetheory of multimedia learning as a framework,we conducted two within-subject experimentswith 10 participants each in order toinvestigate (1) if the audiovisual presentationof verbal and pictorial learning materialswould lead to a higher demand on phonologicalcognitive capacities than the visual-onlypresentation of the same material, and (2) ifadding seductive background music to anaudiovisual information presentation wouldincrease the phonological cognitive load. Weemployed the dual-task methodology in order toachieve a direct measurement of cognitive loadin the phonological system. In bothexperiments, the modality effect could beconfirmed in the patterns of secondary taskperformance and in the primary learning task.     

Is too much help an obstacle? Effects of interactivity and cognitive style on learning with dynamic versus non-dynamic visualizations with narrative explanations

Educational technology research and development - The aim of this study was to investigate the role of visual/verbal cognitive style and interactivity level in dynamic and non-dynamic multimedia...