Pädagogische Hochschule Steiermark

This article contributes to political ecologies of education by connecting climate activism in Austria to questions of environmental justice and ecopedagogy. Based on a collaboration project between trainee teachers and secondary school students in Graz (Austria), the article analyses student group essays and photo reports dealing with ideas and solutions to combat the climate crisis and to enable socio-ecological transformation. Interviews with Fridays for Future (FFF) strike participants complete the analysis. I discuss propositions related to the concepts of activism, ecopedagogy, environmental and climate justice, and especially the principle of responsibility. I show that the school collaboration project and common participation in a climate strike contributed to civic engagement and research-based learning. Trainee teachers and school students exchanged ideas and co-created knowledge to fight against the climate crisis, and the collaboration opened a dialogue in a democratic classroom, arguably helping to develop participants' intrinsic motivation. While some of the ideas proposed are reformist or oppositional, for example to eat less meat, others are propositional, advocating for system change. A conclusion is that the climate movement is represented by a diversity of voices and opinions.

The present study administered six test instruments to 13‐ to 14‐year‐old learners of English in Austria and Sweden ( N = 213), countries offering settings with more explicit and implicit learning environments, respectively. Confirmatory Factor Analyses for Austria yielded a factor comprising timed grammaticality judgment tests, an oral narrative test, and elicited imitation, labelled in this study Automatized and/or Implicit Knowledge, and a factor including an untimed grammaticality judgment test and a metalinguistic knowledge test, named in this study Explicit Knowledge. In the Swedish context, goodness‐of‐fit indices provided some evidence that a single‐factor model shows a better fit, although a comparison of this model with two‐factor models did not reach statistical significance. The findings point to the potential importance of considering the specificities of a learning environment in interpreting learner achievement on measures of the implicit versus explicit knowledge spectrum.

While the objective level of intelligence is not associated with narcissism, relations to self-assessed intelligence (SAI) have been repeatedly reported. Existing research suggests that different facets of narcissism may have different associations with SAI. In the current daily diary study ( N = 176; N = 3975 total observations), we employed dynamic structural equation modeling to examine the relationships between facets of trait and state narcissism (i.e., agentic, antagonistic, and neurotic) and the level, variability, and instability of SAI assessed over 28 consecutive days. Both trait and state narcissism were consistently related to SAI: agentic narcissism showed a positive relationship, whereas antagonistic and neurotic narcissism showed negative relationships with SAI. Trait agentic and state antagonistic narcissism predicted greater variability of SAI scores throughout the study, while neither trait nor state narcissism predicted the instability of SAI. Finally, we found that experiencing increased agentic narcissism on one day, predicted perceiving oneself as more intelligent on the next day, but feeling smarter did not predict feeling narcissistic over time. Moreover, we demonstrated that differentiating between narcissism facets yielded more theoretically accurate results compared to distinguishing between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism.

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has emerged as one of the most formidable global crises, leading to the disruptions to education systems worldwide and impacting learning attitudes and psychological well-being of various learner groups, including university students. In this context, students’ appraisals of adverse learning situations play a key role. It is not just the learning situation, but rather students’ appraisal of it which impacts their emotions, attitudes, and behaviors in academic context. The aim of the present study was to investigate how university students’ challenge and threat appraisals were related to emotional learning experiences and learning outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the study focuses on the role of personal and external resources for learning in this context. Methods Altogether, 428 students, who attended a Psychology lecture at one Austrian university, filled in a questionnaire about their challenge and threat appraisals of learning circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic, achievement emotions they experienced during this time as well as gender, proneness to anxiety, academic self-concept, and learning resources. Additionally, students’ performance in the examination was recorded. Results The structural equation model emphasizes a crucial role of challenge and threat appraisals for students’ achievement emotions in learning and exam preparation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Challenge appraisals were the strongest predictor for pleasant emotions and threat appraisals were strongest predictor for unpleasant emotions. Proneness to anxiety was related to threat appraisal as well as to experience of more unpleasant and, surprisingly, to positive emotions in adverse learning situation. Academic self-concept and learning resources were identified as important resources for learning in adverse learning situation. Unpleasant achievement emotions were directly and negatively related to academic performance and may thus be seen as a critical variable and crucial obstacle to academic performance. Discussion The present study provides implications for learning and instructions which could be implemented by universities in order to support learning and learning attitudes among university students in adverse learning situations.

Intensive care unit (ICU) hospitalization is challenging for the family members of the patients. Most family members report some level of anxiety and depression, sometimes even resulting in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). An association has been reported between lack of information and PTSD. This study had three aims: to quantify the psychological burden of family members of critically ill patients, to explore whether a website with specific information could reduce PTSD symptoms, and to ascertain whether a website with information about intensive care would be used. A multicenter double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial was carried out in Austria and Switzerland. In total, 89 members of families of critically ill patients (mean age 47.3 ± 12.9 years, female n = 59, 66.3%) were included in the study. 46 relatives were allocated to the intervention website and 43 to the control website. Baseline Impact of Event Scale (IES) score was 27.5 ± 12.7. Overall, 50% showed clinically relevant PTSD symptoms at baseline. Mean IES score for the primary endpoint (~ 30 days after inclusion, T1) was 24 ± 15.8 (intervention 23.9 ± 17.9 vs. control 24.1 ± 13.5, p = 0.892). Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS - Deutsch (D)) score at T1 was 12.2 ± 6.1 (min. 3, max. 31) and did not differ between groups. Use of the website differed between the groups (intervention min. 1, max. 14 vs. min. 1, max. 3; total 1386 “clicks” on the website, intervention 1021 vs. control 365). Recruitment was prematurely stopped in February 2020 due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Family members of critically ill patients often have significant PTSD symptoms and online information on critical illness did not result in reduced PTSD symptoms.

Remote laboratories can be an essential support for teaching and learning. They offer possibilities that otherwise cannot be implemented in the classroom. The project OnLabEdu (Online Laboratories for School Education) focuses on developing remote labs for school, including the development of appropriate accompanying teaching and learning materials. This paper presents the first design of a learning arrangement for a characteristic curve remote lab. The learning arrangement was designed based on the model of educational reconstruction and therefore, takes the clarification of the scientific content and students’ perspectives into account. The topic is RGB LEDs and the connection of the terms energy, forward voltage, and wavelength of light. Following a design-based research approach, the learning arrangement was evaluated through two probing acceptance interviews with two high school students. The main goal was to identify first hints on learning obstacles, along with elements that support learning within the learning arrangement together with the handling of the remote lab itself. The results showed barriers to conceptual understanding of energy and forward voltage and that students had problems writing down their ideas in appropriate technical language. Furthermore, the students noted room for improvement concerning the interface of the remote lab. Based on these findings, ideas for re-designing the learning arrangement are discussed.

This book addresses an under-researched area within populism studies: the discourse of supporters of populist parties. Taking the 2019 European elections as their case study, the authors analyse how supporters in eleven different countries construct identities and voting motivations on social media. The individual chapters comprise a range of methods to investigate data from different social media platforms, defining populism as a political strategy and/or practice, realised in discourse, that is based on a dichotomy between “the people”, who are unified by their will, and an out-group whose actions are not in the interest of the people, with a leader safeguarding the interests of the people against the out-group. The book identifies what motivates people to vote for populist parties, what role national identities and values play in those motivations, and how the social media postings of populist parties are recontextualised in supporters’ comments to serve as a voting motivation.

This book addresses an under-researched area within populism studies: the discourse of supporters of populist parties. Taking the 2019 European elections as their case study, the authors analyse how supporters in eleven different countries construct identities and voting motivations on social media. The individual chapters comprise a range of methods to investigate data from different social media platforms, defining populism as a political strategy and/or practice, realised in discourse, that is based on a dichotomy between “the people”, who are unified by their will, and an out-group whose actions are not in the interest of the people, with a leader safeguarding the interests of the people against the out-group. The book identifies what motivates people to vote for populist parties, what role national identities and values play in those motivations, and how the social media postings of populist parties are recontextualised in supporters’ comments to serve as a voting motivation.

This book addresses an under-researched area within populism studies: the discourse of supporters of populist parties. Taking the 2019 European elections as their case study, the authors analyse how supporters in eleven different countries construct identities and voting motivations on social media. The individual chapters comprise a range of methods to investigate data from different social media platforms, defining populism as a political strategy and/or practice, realised in discourse, that is based on a dichotomy between “the people”, who are unified by their will, and an out-group whose actions are not in the interest of the people, with a leader safeguarding the interests of the people against the out-group. The book identifies what motivates people to vote for populist parties, what role national identities and values play in those motivations, and how the social media postings of populist parties are recontextualised in supporters’ comments to serve as a voting motivation.

It took 11 people 4 years to finish the 333 pages of this book, but we got there in the end: “Voices of Supporters: Populist parties, social media and the 2019 European elections” is now available as a hardcover or as an ebook. https://www.benjamins.com/catalog/dapsac.101 The book addresses an under-researched area within populism studies: the discourse of supporters of populist parties. Taking the 2019 European elections as our case study, we analyse how supporters across Europe construct identities and voting motivations on social media. The individual chapters comprise a range of methods to investigate data from different social media platforms. The book identifies what motivates people to vote for populist parties, what role national identities and values play in those motivations, and how the social media postings of populist parties are recontextualised in supporters’ comments to serve as a voting motivation. If you’d like to know more, you can read this introduction, including an overview of the chapters.

This book addresses an under-researched area within populism studies: the discourse of supporters of populist parties. Taking the 2019 European elections as their case study, the authors analyse how supporters in eleven different countries construct identities and voting motivations on social media. The individual chapters comprise a range of methods to investigate data from different social media platforms, defining populism as a political strategy and/or practice, realised in discourse, that is based on a dichotomy between “the people”, who are unified by their will, and an out-group whose actions are not in the interest of the people, with a leader safeguarding the interests of the people against the out-group. The book identifies what motivates people to vote for populist parties, what role national identities and values play in those motivations, and how the social media postings of populist parties are recontextualised in supporters’ comments to serve as a voting motivation.

Background There is a strong association between lifestyle behavior and health status. While young adulthood is a critical period for adopting and stabilizing lifelong healthy behavior, university life is independently associated with psychological stressors that may further affect health and well-being.Objective The present multidisciplinary study aimed to examine the health behavior of Austrian college and university students, differentiated based on diet types (vegan, vegetarian, and omnivorous) and physical activity (PA) habits.Methods Following a cross-sectional study design, a total number of 6,148 students (65.3% females; 66.1% bachelor students, 67.0% from urban areas; mean age: 24.8 years) from 52 Austrian college/universities participated in an online survey and provided data on sociodemographic characteristics, dietary patterns, PA habits, and other lifestyle behavior characteristics, including alcohol intake and smoking.ResultsAcross the total sample, 74.0% had a normal weight (BMI = 18.5–25.0 kg/m2), while the prevalence of overweight/obesity (BMI ≥ 30.0 kg/m2) was lower in females than males and more in rural than urban students (p < 0.01). The general prevalence of vegetarian and vegan diets was 22.8 and 6.0%, respectively, with a predominance of females, graduates, and urban students compared to their peers (p < 0.01). The majority of students (79.3%) had a regular engagement in sport/exercise, with a predominance of vegetarian or vegan students compared to omnivores (p < 0.01). Vegans and vegetarians had a lower alcohol intake (p < 0.01) but no differences in smoking habits (p > 0.05) compared to omnivores. Students engaging in sport/exercise had a lower smoking rate and higher intake of fruits, vegetables, and fluids compared to inactive students (p < 0.01).Conclusion The present findings suggest that diet type and PA habits of college/university students have an impact on other health behaviors, highlighting the interconnected nature of lifestyle habits and health behavior.

It can be suggested that pre-service primary school teachers' sense of belonging to science may be influential to their professionalization within university-based teacher education programs, which intend to prepare them for teaching natural sciences in primary school. Nevertheless, because only few studies have examined teachers' sense of belonging to science so far, further research in this regard seems both reasonable and necessary. To this end, there is a need for instruments enabling a valid assessment of pre-service primary school teachers' sense of belonging to science. However, existing sense-of-belonging-to-science instruments require a comparatively long time on task due to their significant number of items. Consequently, the applicability of these instruments within research is limited because surveys in educational contexts must often be brief and economical. The research we present in this article aims to tackle this issue by examining on an exploratory level whether and to what extent pre-service primary school teachers' sense of belonging to science can be validly assessed using a single-item instrument. In doing so we report qualitative, as well as quantitative, findings that provide evidence regarding the validity of our instrument. Implications of the present study for future research are outlined at the end of this article.

Background The association between lifestyle and health status highlights the importance of assessing health-related behavior in different populations. This multidisciplinary study aimed to examine the health behavior of academic staff of Austrian colleges and universities, with a specific focus on diet types (vegan, vegetarian, omnivorous) and physical activity (PA) reports.Methods Following a cross-sectional study design incorporating an online survey, a sample of 1,041 academics from 52 institutes (mean age: 46.4 years) provided data on sociodemographic characteristics, dietary patterns, PA behavior, and other lifestyle behaviors (smoking, alcohol intake, etc.).ResultsThe prevalence of vegetarian and vegan diets was 13.2 and 2.0%, respectively, and 33.2% of participants had excess body weight (BMI ≥ 25). The majority of participants (88.5%) reported regularly engaging in leisure-time PA, but 18.6% were active members of sports clubs. No difference between females and males was observed in diet type and the type of sport participation (p > 0.05). Participants with a mixed diet had a higher BMI than vegetarians and vegans (p < 0.05). Leisure-time PA participation was associated with more frequent fruit and vegetable intake (p < 0.05). The prevalence of smoking and alcohol intake was 13.1 and 73.5%, respectively, without any difference between dietary or sports participation subgroups (p > 0.05).Conclusion The present study provides an overview of the social trends in vegan and vegetarian diets linked to health behaviors in tertiary educational settings. Findings can be used by health scientists, decision-makers, and multipliers in health and education to improve public health.

Preparing young people to meet emerging contemporary challenges has become a global imperative. Over two decades, there has been a call for students’ active participation in the life of school and society, and an important feature of this call is student-led research (SLR). However, this pedagogical and empowering call with many potential benefits is not unproblematic. There are far-reaching differences between various conceptions and use of student-led research in secondary schools both within and between different countries, reflecting a contrast between skill development and voice. This contrast, however, has not been previously scrutinised and discussed. We review student-led research in England, Ireland, and Russia showing that its development has been initiated and carried out in different countries with very different goals and focuses. Our study is in the form of a case study of the three countries covering a wide range of discussions related to SLR. By looking critically at how SLR is conceived and supported in various contexts, we evaluate facilitators and barriers, which ultimately offers a better understanding of how ideologies and political decisions influence students and teachers, and how educational policies and educational values are transferred into practice.

This article addresses aggregation as a fundamental practice in educational psychology and ties it into the idiographic/nomothetic distinction, that is, distinguishing between studying what once was and studying what always is. I address the underlying assumptions of seminal educational research (OECD’s large-scales assessment and Hattie’s synthesizing meta-analyses). I argue that educational psychologists assume a priori general educational principles akin to nomothetic laws without sufficiently scrutinizing the limitations of aggregation. I then contextualize this assumption within the history of psychology, and address how these assumptions shape how educational psychologists view, collect, and examine data. Furthermore, I contextualize this assumption with an example showing a peculiarity of educational research: the existence of multiple perspectives on constructs. Finally, I argue that investing time and resources in the debate on aggregation and the epistemic nature of the insights that educational psychologists generate will ultimately advance the field and help bridge the theory–practice gap.

Reading and arithmetic are core domains of academic achievement with marked impact on career opportunities and socioeconomic status. While associations between reading and arithmetic are well established, evidence on underlying mechanisms is inconclusive. The main goal of this study was to reevaluate the domain-specificity of established predictors and to enhance our understanding of the (co-)development of reading and arithmetic. In a sample of 885 German-speaking children, standard domain-specific predictors of reading and arithmetic were assessed before and/or at the onset of formal schooling. Reading and arithmetic skills were measured at the beginning and end of second grade. Latent variables were extracted for all relevant constructs: Grapheme-phoneme processing (phonological awareness, letter identification), RAN (RAN-objects, RAN-digits), number system knowledge (number identification, successor knowledge), and magnitude processing (non-symbolic and symbolic magnitude comparison), as well as the criterion measures reading and arithmetic. Four structural equation models tested distinct research questions. Grapheme-phoneme processing was a specific predictor of reading, and magnitude processing explained variance specific to arithmetic. RAN explained variance in both domains, and it explained variance in reading even after controlling for arithmetic. RAN and number system knowledge further explained variance in skills shared between reading and arithmetic. Reading and arithmetic entail domain-specific cognitive components, and they both require tight networks of visual, verbal, and semantic information, as reflected by RAN. This perspective provides a useful background to explain associations and dissociations between reading and arithmetic performance.