Jakob Schwerter

• PhD
• Research Assistant at TU Dortmund University

Are exam grades predetermined by students' prior performance and personal characteristics, or can underperforming students catch up? We evaluate whether additional e-learning practice opportunities increase learning outcomes for a group of undergraduate business students enrolled in a university math course (N = 281). During the semester, students...

E-learning opportunities have become an increasingly important component of university education. Various laboratory studies have shown that e-learning environments can meaningfully enhance learning by incorporating various interventions and design choices (e.g., providing feedback and scaffolds). However, many computer-based interventions have not...

This paper studies the consequences of a curriculum reform of the last two years of high school in one of the German federal states on the share of male and female students who complete degrees in STEM subjects and later work in STEM occupations. The reform had two important aspects: (i) it equalized all students’ exposure to maths by making advanc...

Many women do not work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations even though they have degrees in these subjects. To shed light on this problem, we use information from the German Graduate Panel and show a significant gender gap among STEM graduates working in degree-related occupations after graduation. Therefore, we...

Underlying reasons for certain voting outcomes are subject to a vivid debate – especially in times of landslide changes in voting outcomes of long-established parties in many European countries including Germany. The linkages between these voting outcomes and economic indicators are rather elusive since many confounding and unobservable aspects det...

Tree-based learning methods such as Random Forest and XGBoost are still the gold-standard prediction methods for tabular data. Feature importance measures are usually considered for feature selection as well as to assess the effect of features on the outcome variables in the model. This also applies to survey data, which are frequently encountered...

Prediction Rule Ensembles (PREs) are robust and interpretable statistical learning techniques with potential for predictive analytics, yet their efficacy in the presence of missing data is untested. This study uses multiple imputation to fill in missing values, but uses a data stacking approach instead of a traditional model pooling approach to com...

Based on the relationships motivation theory, it can be assumed that social interactions in elementary school are essential for students’ development and especially for their school success. Thus, this study examined how vital social resources, more precisely social interactions with peers and teachers, are for two central aspects of school success...

Early-life environments can have long-lasting effects on individuals' later life courses. Interestingly, research on the effects of school reforms has hardly adopted this perspective. Therefore, we investigate a staggered school reform that reduced the number of school years and increased weekly instructional time for secondary school students in m...

University students often learn statistics in large classes, and in such learning environments, students face an exceptionally high risk of failure. One reason for this is students’ frequent statistics anxiety. This study shows how students can be supported using e-learning exercises with automated knowledge of correct response feedback, supplement...

This simulation study evaluates the effectiveness of multiple imputation (MI) techniques for multilevel data. It compares the performance of traditional Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE) with tree-based methods such as Chained Random Forests with Predictive Mean Matching and Extreme Gradient Boosting. Adapted versions that include dum...

Based on the relationships motivation theory, it can be assumed that social interactions in elementary school are essential for students’ development and especially for their school success. Thus, this study examined how vital social resources, more precisely social interactions with peers and teachers, are for two central aspects of school success...

Despite its potential to support reading and spelling development in children with or without dyslexia, research on the effectiveness of digital trainings carried out at home is scarce. This study investigated the effectiveness of a novel digital game-based spelling training for unassisted use at home (Prosodiya). The pedagogical approach differs f...

Early-life environments can have long-lasting effects on how individual life courses develop. Interestingly, research on the effects of school reforms has hardly adopted this perspective. Therefore, we investigate a staggered school reform that reduced the number of school years and increased weekly instructional time for secondary school students...

A better understanding of how distractor features influence the plausibility of distractors is essential for an efficient multiple-choice (MC) item construction in educational assessment. The plausibility of distractors has a major influence on the psychometric characteristics of MC items. Our analysis utilizes the nominal categories model to inves...

This study examined regional differences in students' academic achievement, well-being, and motivation as well as factors explaining systematic variation. We used the complete representative German PIRLS 2016 data (N = 3,959 fourth-grade students, mean(age) = 10.34 years; 49% girls; 71% from a non-immigrant background) by combining bootstrapping, m...

Students’ school-related well-being (SWB) is of vital importance. Nevertheless, it is unclear how SWB develops in late adolescence, especially among students in high-achieving environments and which factors are associated with it. Based on a longitudinal dataset (T1: Grade 11, T2: Grade 12), we analyzed how SWB (school satisfaction, academic self-c...

University students often learn statistics in large classes, and in such learning environments, students face an exceptionally high risk of failure. One reason for this is students' frequent statistics anxiety. This study shows how students can be supported using e-learning exercises with automated knowledge of correct response feedback, supplement...

Assessing children’s literacy skills is a key requirement for successful learning. However, standardized assessments are almost exclusively available as paper-and-pencil tests, discarding digital testing’s advantages. In this article, we develop and evaluate two different tablet versions for a paper-based reading fluency test for German primary sch...

The general literature shows a wage premium for graduates from high-quality, elite, or more selective universities. These results, however, were established for countries with a clear hierarchy of top universities, such as the US, England, and Australia. I evaluate if such an effect exists in Germany, where individual universities are top performin...

Teachers need to continuously monitor students' engagement in classrooms, but novice teachers have difficulties paying attention to individual behavioral cues in all learners. To investigate these interaction processes in more detail, we re-analyzed eye-tracking data from preservice teachers teaching simulated learners who engaged in different beha...

The general literature shows a wage premium for graduates from high quality, elite, or more selective universities. These results, however, were established for countries with a clear hierarchy of top universities, such as the US, England, and Australia. I evaluate if such an effect also exists in Germany, a country in which individual universities...