Christian Fischer

Intermate Media GmbH

Online summer courses offer opportunities to catch-up or stay on-track with course credits for students who cannot otherwise attend face-to-face summer courses. While online courses may have certain advantages, participation patterns and student success in summer terms are not yet well understood. This quantitative study analyzed four years of inst...

The emergence of big data in educational contexts has led to new data-driven approaches to support informed decision making and efforts to improve educational effectiveness. Digital traces of student behavior promise more scalable and finer-grained understanding and support of learning processes that were previously too costly to obtain with tradit...

This mixed-methods observational study analyzes Advanced Placement (AP) Biology teachers' engagement in microblogging for professional learning. Data from three hashtag-based Twitter communities-#apbiochat, #apbioleaderacad, and #apbioleaderacademy (121 users; 2,253 tweets)-are analyzed using educational data mining, qualitative two-cycle content a...

Situated in the context of the Advanced Placement curriculum reform in the sciences, this quantitative study validates selected elements of Desimone's (2009) conceptual framework on teacher professional development. Using national data sets with data from 133 336 students and 7434 teachers, multi-level structural equation models indicate that profe...

Background: Many students enter into postsecondary education without the preparation to face the demands of postsecondary coursework in science. Increasingly, policymakers and educational researchers are responding to calls for reforming secondary education to provide more opportunity for all students to receive high-quality education and to become...

Situated in the context of advanced placement (AP) reform in the United States, we investigated profiles of teachers’ motivation for participating in professional development (PD) courses in a two-cohort sample of nt1 = 2,369 and nt2 = 2,170 chemistry teachers via multilevel latent class analysis. In addition, the study investigated to what extent...

We point out potential drawbacks of some of Leising et al.’s (2022a) proposed ways how personality science can be improved. We argue that it is ill-advised to use only one measure for a concept. Also, we argue that researchers should not refrain from conducting a study when a high level of statistical power is precluded. Then, we go one step furthe...

Recent research indicated the advantages of diversified teacher professional development participation patterns (PDPP) to foster teachers' professionalisation. This study investigated teachers' PDPP from both cross-sectional and longitudinal perspectives using data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) utilising information on teachers'...

Teachers turn to many sources for support and professional learning, including social media-based communities that have shown promise to help teachers access resources and facilitate productive exchanges. Although such online communities show promise, questions about their quality for providing a suitable learning environment remain insufficiently...

Digital technologies permeate modern life, and schools are accordingly expected to help students develop related knowledge and skills. As a result, educators’ professional digital competence (PDC) has received substantial attention from school leaders, policymakers, teacher educators, and researchers. Theory and prior research suggest that educator...

Field trips provide real-world learning opportunities in biology education as they promote knowledge about nature among other things. As biodiversity is declining knowledge of species is important for understanding and appreciating the natural world and its implications. Many field guides are digitally available, but differences from traditional bo...

The release and rapid diffusion of ChatGPT have caught the attention of educators worldwide. Some educators are enthusiastic about its potential to support learning. Others are concerned about how it might circumvent learning opportunities or contribute to misinformation. To better understand reactions about ChatGPT concerning education, we analyze...

Teachers' professional development is crucial for effective classroom practice. Due to its advantages, many teachers have participated in online professional development (OPD) in recent years. Numerous studies have investigated the effectiveness of OPD either on the teacher, their classroom, or the student level. However, a comprehensive meta-analy...

Theories of cognitive development among emerging adults posit that environmental and age-related influences are responsible for individual differences in complex reasoning abilities. Exposure to and engagement with a diverse set of ideas and perspectives is stipulated to provide a context for which individuals are positioned to coordinate, integrat...

Urban and suburban green and blue spaces are important places for human recreation, and the impact of biodiversity on psychological and recalled restoration has received much attention. This study addresses the relationship between bird species richness and restoration in a controlled field experiment (guided bird walk) applying a battery of indivi...

The release and rapid diffusion of ChatGPT have caught the attention of educators worldwide. Some educators are enthusiastic about its potential to support learning, others are concerned about how it might circumvent learning opportunities or contribute to misinformation. To better understand reactions about ChatGPT concerning education, we analyze...

Teacher collaboration is an important feature of job satisfaction and self-efficacy of teachers. Moreover, the collaboration of teachers is important for adopting professional changes, as professional development (PD) activities that include opportunities for collaboration have been shown to support teachers in improving classroom practice, leading...

Teacher collaboration is an important feature of job satisfaction and self-efficacy for teachers. Moreover, the collaboration of teachers is important for adopting pro- fessional changes as professional development (PD) activities that include opportunities for collaboration have been shown to support teachers in improving classroom practice. This...

Schools and school districts use social media for a variety of reasons, but alongside the benefits of schools' social media use come potential risks to students' privacy. Using a novel dataset of around 18 million Facebook posts by schools and districts in the United States, we explore the extent to which personally identifiable information of stud...

Education policy stakeholders attempt to counteract teacher shortages by recruiting persons from outside of the teacher career. However, teachers' job satisfaction, a key predictor for teacher retention, often differs between those originally trained as a teacher and those from different career pathways. Applying multiple indicator multiple causes...

Dieser Artikel beschreibt Experimentiervorschläge zu den Keplerschen Gesetzen im Fach Physik, die anhand eines Modellexperiments mit einem Gravitationstrichter und einer computergestützten Simulation vertieft werden. Dabei steht dieArbeit mit Modellen im Vordergrund, wodurch Schüler/innen ein umfassendes Bild verschiedener Modelle für ein reales Ph...

The importance of online learning in higher education settings is growing, not only in wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, metrics to evaluate and increase the quality of online instruction are crucial for improving student learning. Whereas instructional quality is traditionally evaluated with course observations or student evaluations, cour...

Public schools and districts use social media to share announcements and communicate with parents and the community, but alongside such uses run risks to students’ privacy. Using a novel data set of 18 million posts on Facebook by schools and school districts in the United States, we sought to establish how frequently photos of students were shared...

In the sciences, the laboratory is one of the most impactful spaces for student learning, engagement, and experience. Prior knowledge gleaned during lecture and laboratory discussion (i.e., a course section designed to further emphasize conceptual content underlying experiments and inform students about laboratory procedures or safety precautions)...

Theories of cognitive development among emerging adults posit that environmental and age-related influences are responsible for individual differences in complex reasoning abilities. Exposure to and engagement with a diverse set of ideas and perspectives is stipulated to provide a context for which individuals are positioned to coordinate, integrat...

Dieser Artikel beschreibt Experimentiervorschläge zu den Keplerschen Gesetzen im Fach Physik, die anhand eines Modellexperiments mit einem Gravitationstrichter und einer computergestützten Simulation vertieft werden. Dabei steht die Arbeit mit Modellen im Vordergrund, wodurch Schüler/innen ein umfassendes Bild verschiedener Modelle für ein reales P...

Teachers turn to many sources for support and professional learning, including social media-based communities that have shown promise to help teachers access resources and facilitate productive exchanges. Although such online communities show promise, questions about their quality for providing a suitable learning environment remain insufficiently...

Approximately 2 million students take Advanced Placement (AP) examinations annually. However, departmental policies that allow students to replace introductory courses with AP credit greatly vary within and across universities, even across relatively similar universities. This study examines the impact of AP credit policies on second‐course success...

Digitalität ist aus der Bildung nicht mehr wegzudenken. Damit sich ihr Potenzial entfalten kann, müssen wir wissen, was sinnvoll ist, worauf wir achten müssen und unter welchen Bedingungen Lernen mit digitalen Medien gelingen kann. Hierzu kann die Bildungsforschung einen Beitrag leisten. Ein Überblick über die Bandbreite an Forschungsprojekten am H...

This study examined the effectiveness of lectures and inquiry-based instruction in supporting learning for language minority (LM) students in science gateway courses at a large public research university. Utilizing institutional data from 6,911 students across nine years, we fitted cross–lagged panel designs to model associations between lecture co...

Schools and school districts now use social media for a variety of reasons, but alongside the benefits that accompany these K-12 educational institutions' social media use come questions about privacy and safety. We use a dataset of around 18 million posts by United States schools and districts on Facebook to explore how these posts might risk the...

Colleges and universities have increasingly worried in recent decades about college students’ well-being, with the COVID-19 pandemic aggravating these concerns. Our study examines changes to undergraduate emotional sentiments and psychological well-being from before to after the onset of the pandemic. In addition, we explore whether certain risk fa...

Schools and districts use social media to share announcements and build vibrant communities, but alongside such uses run risks to students’ privacy and safety. Using a novel data set of more than 17 million posts from 2010-2020 of schools and school districts in the United States on Facebook, we sought to establish how frequently photos of students...

This quantitative study examined student participation in an introductory project-based engineering course offered in fully face-to-face and hybrid course modes (N = 160). This course attempted to counteract trends of decreased student motivation and high attrition rates among engineering majors. Mixed-design analysis of variance examined differenc...

Teachers participate in professional learning activities to enhance their pedagogical knowledge and share best practices—and the increasing role of technologies in education, including social media, is shifting how this professional learning occurs. The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to consider the role of social media for professional...

Online courses provide flexible learning opportunities, but research suggests that students may learn less and persist at lower rates compared to face-to-face settings. However, few studies have investigated more distal effects of online education. In this study, we analyzed 6 years of institutional data for three cohorts of students in 13 large ma...

Video motion analysis allows tracing trajectories of objects in motion and is an established method in physics education. Tablet computers, with their integrated cameras, offer the opportunity to both record and analyze dynamic motions during experiments on a single device. This enables students to work without transitioning the data between camera...

Das Forschungsdatenzentrum (FDZ) am Institut zur Qualitätsentwicklung im Bildungswesen (IQB) archiviert die Datensätze von großen nationalen und internationalen Schulleistungsstudien sowie kleinerer lokaler Studien und stellt sie der Wissenschaft zur Verfügung. Für die Bildungsforschung liefert die Datenbank damit wahre Datens(ch)ätze, um neue Erke...

For many schools and districts in the United States, Facebook has emerged as an important tool for sharing timely information, building a sense of community, highlighting staff and students, and many other purposes. However, neither researchers nor schools and districts have paid enough attention to how their Facebook use may pose a risk to the pri...

Die sogenannten VERgleichsArbeiten (kurz VERA) sind weitestgehend standardisierte Kompetenztests. Mit ihnen wird geprüft, welchen Lernstand und welche Kompetenzen Schülerinnen und Schüler in der 3. und 8. Jahrgangsstufe erreicht haben. Für Schulleitungen und Lehrkräfte sind sie eine Möglichkeit, den Lernprozess ihrer Schülerinnen und Schüler zu ver...

A central question in educational research is how classroom climate variables, such as teaching quality, goal structures, or interpersonal teacher behavior, are related to critical student outcomes, such as students’ achievement and motivation. Student ratings are frequently used to measure classroom climate. When using student ratings to assess cl...

The extraction of sentiment from text requires many method-ological decisions to make inferences about mood, opinion, and engagement in informal learning contexts. This study compares sentiment software (SentiStrength, LIWC, tidy-text, VADER) on N = 1,382,493 tweets in the context of the Next Generation Science Standards reform (N = 546,267) and U....

Digitale Weiterbildungsangebote für Lehrkräfte haben in der Corona-Pandemie neuen Aufschwung erhalten. Auch auf sozialen Plattformen wie Twitter bilden sich immer mehr Lehrkräfte weiter-und das mitunter sogar erfolgreicher als in Präsenzveranstaltungen. Eine wichtige Rolle, die die Fortbildung auf sozialen Medien erst ermöglicht, spielt die fachlic...

As the use of social media increases in daily life, it has also increased for institutions in the field of education. While there may be benefits for schools to use this media outlet, the privacy of students within those schools may be at risk when their names and photos are shared on such a publicly accessible domain. In this study, we analyzed th...

When translating large-scale policy changes into educational practice, classroom-level implementation is crucial and dependent on teachers’ capabilities. Most research underscores the importance of professional development (PD) as a proximal factor to achieve educational change. Connected to the recent Advanced Placement (AP) science examination re...

Die Khan Academy ist eine der weltweit am meisten genutzten virtuellen Lehr-Lernplattformen. Die Lernumgebung geht auf den individuellen Wissensstand der Kinder und Jugendlichen ein und kann so die Tiefenstrukturen des Lernens fördern. Das sind Lehr-Lernprozesse, die die Lern- und Entwicklungsprozesse der Schülerinnen und Schüler am stärksten förde...

Approximately two million students take Advanced Placement (AP) examinations annually. However, departmental policies that allow students to replace introductory courses with AP credit greatly vary within and across universities, even across relatively similar universities. This study examines the impact of AP credit policies on subsequent course s...

System-wide educational reforms are difficult to implement in the United States, but despite the difficulties, reforms can be successful, particularly when they are associated with broad public support. This study reports on the nature of the public sentiment expressed about a nationwide science education reform effort, the Next Generation Science...

Vor 44.000 Jahren begannen Menschen sich Geschichten zu erzählen und damit Wissen und Werte an nachfolgende Generationen weiterzugeben. Aus Höhlenwänden wurde im Laufe der Zeit Papier und nun mit Computern begeistern sich viele Schülerinnen und Schüler für das „Digital Storytelling“. Plattformen wie Scratch verbinden das Storytelling, wie das Gesch...

Tausende Lehrkräfte tauschen sich täglich in den sozialen Netzwerken aus. Insbesondere Twitter ist ein Treffpunkt – nicht nur zum persönlichen Plausch, sondern auch für den professionellen Austausch mit anderen Lehrkräften über Schulbezirks- und Bundeslandgrenzen hinweg. Sie teilen Unterrichtsmaterialien und Links zu Informationsquellen, besprechen...

Teachers participate in professional development activities to enhance their pedagogical knowledge and share best practices—and the increasing role of technologies in education, including social media, is shifting how this professional development occurs. The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to further consider the role of social media for...

For many if not posts schools and districts around the United States, the use of Facebook has emerged as a novel communication practice that serves several purposes, including sharing timely information, building a sense of community, and highlighting staff and students. An element of these posts that neither researchers nor, we think, most schools...

Woher kommt unser Strom? Wie lassen sich Daten von einem Ort an einen anderen übertragen? Welche Rolle spielt Mutation dabei, dass bestimmte Individuen bessere Überlebenschancen haben als andere? Das Verständnis von naturwissenschaftlichen Zusammenhängen ist ein grundlegender Baustein in Bildungsprozessen. Entscheidend ist dabei jedoch vor allem di...

Videospiele machen süchtig, faul und gewalttätig - ist die landläufige Meinung. Neuere Erkenntnisse zeigen jedoch, dass sich diese Vorurteile nicht so leicht aufrechterhalten lassen. Im Gegenteil: Wer Videospiele spielt, kann sogar Vorteile beim Lernen haben. Mit dem Ansatz des Gameful Learning auf Plattformen wie GradeCraft soll nun auch die Motiv...

Zusammenfassung Während der durch die Corona-Pandemie bedingten Schulschließungen im März 2020 führten viele Schulen Fernunterricht ein, der häufig ohne wirkliche Vorbereitung als digitaler Unterricht organisiert wurde. Daraufhin war ein verstärkter Austausch unter Lehrpersonen in Online-Communities zu erwarten. Eine Analyse der Kommunikation der O...

As the use of social media increases in daily life, it has also increased for institutions in the field of education. While there may be benefits for schools to use this media outlet, the privacy of students within those schools may be at risk when their names and photos are shared on such a publicly accessible domain. In this study, we analyzed th...

Collaborative tasks do not always promote equal learning. Varying levels of social interactions and regulation at the individual and group levels can influence knowledge construction efforts and learning success. To understand which collaboration patterns may be more conducive to learning, this study examined the relation between social exchange, r...

A growing body of work has shown that two specific study strategies help explain differences in learning and achievement in gateway courses: spacing (breaking up study sessions across multiple days) and self-testing (actively recalling information from memory). However, it is still unclear whether the benefits of these strategies are applicable in...

Weltweit sind, nicht zuletzt inspiriert durch YouTube und Co, viele digitale Lernplattformen entstanden, um Schüler*innen in ihren Lernprozessen zu unterstützen. Eine solche Lernplattform ist Khan Academy. Auf Khan Academy können Nutzer Inhalte vornehmlich zu naturwissenschaftlichen Themen mittels kurzer Erklärvideos und Übungsaufgaben angepasst an...

Self-efficacy has a strong influence on the learning and motivation of science students at the postsecondary level, especially in upper division science classes, which are key to student success in science majors. This empirical mixed methods research study (N = 205) examines the associations between students’ participation in an online preparation...

While the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are a long-standing and widespread standards-based educational reform effort, they have received less public attention, and no studies have explored the sentiment of the views of multiple stakeholders toward them. To establish how public sentiment about this reform might be similar to or different...

This article offers a first look at teacher educators’ (N = 336) perceptions of their technology competencies based on the Teacher Educator Technology Competencies (TETCs; Foulger, Graziano, Schmidt-Crawford, & Slykhuis, 2017). The participants generally rated their competence levels highly in relation to the TETCs. Although many participants repor...

Self-efficacy is an important construct for CS teachers’ professional development, because it can predict both teaching behaviors as well as student outcomes. Research has shown that teachers’ self-efficacy can be as influential as their actual level of knowledge and abilities. However, there has been very limited research on CS teachers’ self-effi...

Background: Many students enter into postsecondary education without the college readiness skills that allow them to face the demands of postsecondary education. Increasingly, policymakers and educational researchers are responding to calls for reforming secondary education to provide more opportunity for all students to receive high quality educat...

There is limited research on how perceived peer network influences student collaboration in project-based instruction. Research based on interviews or content analyses may overlook the semantic structure of discourse. In this study, we combine content analysis with computational linguistics to explore the collaboration patterns of 22 first-year stu...

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) chat (#NGSSchat) is a social media-based professional network used to discuss topics related to the NGSS in the United States. While successful reforms involve and coordinate the work of multiple stakeholders, recent research points out a striking lack of coordination between the individuals working in d...

In higher education, predictive analytics can provide action-able insights to diverse stakeholders such as administrators, instructors, and students. Separate feature sets are typically used for different prediction tasks, e.g., student activity logs for predicting in-course performance and registrar data for predicting long-term college success. H...

Fostering first-year project-based learning (PBL) environments helps to engage students in engineering design practices and broaden their participation pathways in engineering fields. PBL collaborative design activities provide unique opportunities for students to develop, negotiate, and finetune designs. These design activities represent several e...

Teachers frequently use Twitter to engage in professional learning activities. A prominent example of teachers' use of Twitter for such purposes is evident within the #NGSSchat community, which encouraged synchronous (at the same time) conversations between teachers and other educational stakeholders regarding the Next Generation Science Standards...

Background Project‐based learning has shown promise in improving learning outcomes for diverse students. However, studies on its impacts have largely focused on the perceptions of students and instructors or students' immediate performance. This study reports the impact of taking a project‐based introductory engineering course on students' subseque...

Abstract Student clickstream data—time-stamped records of click events in online courses—can provide fine-grained information about student learning. Such data enable researchers and instructors to collect information at scale about how each student navigates through and interacts with online education resources, potentially enabling objective and...

Soziale Medien bieten die Chance zum schnellen Austausch von Informationen und Material zwischen Lehrkräften. Ebenfalls könnten sie eine wichtige Rolle beim Ausbau digitaler Fortbildungsmöglichkeiten einnehmen, da sie Möglichkeiten eröffnen mit anderen Lehrkräften in Kontakt zu treten und Lerngemeinschaften zu gründen, wodurch Professionalisierungs...

Mit der Lernumgebung Scratch können Kinder und Jugendliche erste Einblicke in das Programmierens erhalten. In dieser Programmiersprache werden farbige Bausteine verwendet, mit denen eigene Spiele, Videos oder Multimediaanwendungen erstellt werden können, auch ohne oder mit geringen Computerkenntnissen. Sie eignet sich deshalb bereits in der Grundsc...