Manuela Paechter

• Univ.-Prof. Dr.
• Professor at University of Graz

Starting early in life, children, especially girls, experience obstacles when it comes to developing interest in STEM. Although teachers face an important task in promoting girls (and boys) in STEM, they often encounter hurdles in doing so. A three-month-long training for pre-and in-service teachers in elementary education was developed to counter...

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...

Educators and researchers have been struggling for decades to isolate and measure the factors that contribute to science career decisions. However, there are limited instruments available to measure these factors, particularly across different educational levels. This study describes the adaptation and characteristics of the middle school NextGen S...

Available at: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1440721 Citation: Hackl-Wimmer S, Lackner HK, Eglmaier MTW, Eichen L and Paechter M (2025) Utilizing ECG data in educational psychology research: insights and limitations. Front. Psychol. 16:1440721. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1440721

Knowledge, competencies, and reflective attitudes regarding STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) are essential for navigating global and societal changes in the economy and workforce. As we advance further into the 21st century, knowledge and skills in STEM become increasingly important. Despite this importance, statistics and r...

Knowledge, competencies, and reflective attitudes regarding STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) are essential for navigating global and societal changes in the economy and workforce [...]

In introductory programming courses (IPCs), students encounter various difficulties that are related to low achievement and high dropout and failure rates. Technology-rich approaches that promote self-directed learning while facilitating competency development and knowledge construction through social collaboration may offer advantages in this cont...

Starting early in life, children, especially girls, experience obstacles when it comes to developing an interest in STEM. Although early childhood (EC) educators face an important task in promoting girls (and boys) in STEM, they often face challenges in doing so. Therefore, it is crucial for EC educators to cultivate positive attitudes, self-concep...

"The COVID-19 pandemic has been challenging for academia. Educators and students hopes for a short duration of the pandemic were disappointed soon and in 2021, one year after the onset of the pandemic, most universities were still restricted to online teaching. At the same time, ensuing restrictions due to COVID-19 coupled with uncertainty about th...

The COVID-19 summer semester 2020 posed many challenges and uncertainties, quite unexpectedly and suddenly. In a sample of 314 psychology students, it was investigated how they experienced learning and preparing for an end-of-semester exam, which emotions and strain they experienced, how academic performance was affected, and how personal anteceden...

Zusammenfassung. Medienbildung ist ein Teil des Bildungsauftrags österreichischer Kindertageseinrichtungen ( Charlotte-Bühler-Institut, 2009 ). In der hier vorliegenden Studie wurden 57 frühpädagogische Fachkräfte aus österreichischen Kinderkrippen mittels pilotiertem Fragebogen zu deren digitaler Ausstattung, Häufigkeit und Zweck der (digitalen) M...

Theoretischer Hintergrund Digitale Medien und deren Verwendung sind Teil der täglichen Lebensrealität junger Kinder (Livingstone & Byrne, 2017; Marsh et al., 2015; Ofcom, 2014). Frühpädagogische Fachpersonen haben die Aufgabe, Kindern die Möglichkeit zu bieten, kompetente Mediennutzer:innen zu werden (Charlotte-Bühler-Institut, 2009). Bisher spiele...

Wearable biomedical sensor technology enables reliable monitoring of physiological data, even in very young children. The purpose of the present study was to develop algorithms for gaining valid physiological indicators of sleep quality in toddlers, using data from an undisturbing and easy-to-use wearable device. The study further reports the appli...

Some European countries require early career decisions from their young people. In countries with a dual education system (e.g., Germany, Austria, Switzerland) adolescents as young as 14 or 15 have to come up with career decisions and to apply for an apprenticeship (combining training at the workplace with part-time education in a vocational school...

https://www.mint-maedchen-projekt.de/files/MINT-Maedchen/MINT-Maedchen_Essay_Ertl-und-Co.pdf

Since digital media such as smartphones, tablets or laptops are available in almost every household in industrialised countries, parents are challenged to integrate them into their everyday family life. To gain more information on parents' mediation of digital media, the relationships between their educational intentions, objectives and their child...

The summer semester had just begun at Austrian and German universities when Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization. Thus, in March 2020, all universities closed their campuses, switching to distance learning within the span of about a single day. How did lecturers handle the situation? Were they still able to turn...

"Flexible learning has been associated with e-learning, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Flexible learning gives the students large degrees of freedom to learn what, when, how and where they want. The aim of this study was to evaluate students’ preferences in e-learning and traditional classroom teaching, and was conducted from October 2019 to Ja...

Der Beitrag bewegt sich im Kontext der Geschlechtersegregation bei der Wahl des Ausbildungsberufs im dualen Berufsbildungssystem: Während Handwerk und Technik primär männlich dominiert sind, zählen hingegen unter den weiblichen Lehrlingen kaufmännisch-verwaltende Berufe zu den meistgewählten Lehrberufen. Im Zentrum des Beitrags steht die leitende F...

Recent developments in noninvasive electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring with small, wearable sensors open the opportunity to record high-quality ECG over many hours in an easy and non-burdening way. However, while their recording has been tremendously simplified, the interpretation of heart rate variability (HRV) data is a more delicate matter. The a...

The present article points out the conflicting effects of feedback, it attempts to give first recommendations for teachers. However, most importantly it points out that the orchestration of person- and process-related feedback in STEM classrooms will require more detailed investigation.

While children get in contact with digital technology from an early age on, it is still unclear how this exposure effects the children´s physiological development. The study „Young Children in the digital world (KiddiW)” gathered questionnaire data of the family’s extent of media and technology use, parents’ pedagogical objectives and parenting b...

Careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) rank among the fastest-growing career fields. An ongoing issue in STEM is the problem of gender inequality nearly across the whole life-span with an underrepresentation of girls and women in STEM education and professions. Such gender inequality in STEM is starting from school and...

Against the background of inconsistent findings regarding the symptomatology, etiology, and risk factors of burnout, Farber (1990) proposed three different burnout subtypes: frenetic, underchallenged, and worn-out. Montero-Marín et al. (2011b) expanded the typology to the academic context and developed the Burnout Clinical Subtypes Questionnaire–St...

In der vorliegenden Evaluationsstudie wurden Studierende und Lehrende einer österreichischen Universität befragt, in welchen Bereichen der Lehre sich Studierende eine stärkere Flexibilisierung wünschen und inwieweit sich diese Wünsche von der Einschätzung Lehrender unterscheiden. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Studierende und Lehrende in ihren Präfere...

Purpose Giving a presentation in a seminar is a strenuous academic situation. To meet such a challenge adequately, individuals not only have to activate their mental and physical resources, but they also have to disengage from the task and recover once the challenge has been met. How students experience these situations depends in part on how they...

Affective dispositions may shape students' typical ways of coping when faced with demanding performance situations in their educational lives. We recorded frontal EEG alpha asymmetry responses in psychology students during the course of a scenario designed to simulate a real examination, which required oral explanation of statistical concepts. Whil...

Exams often trigger avoidance motivation and a tendency to withdraw; instead, an approach‐oriented motivational state would be more desirable, since this encourages an invigorated and persistent approach to tasks. This study investigated the role of academic self‐concept on the activation of relative approach versus avoidance motivation during the...

The proportion of women enrolled in STEM courses at university level has remained consistently low for decades. Differences, however, exist between various STEM domains: While engineering and technology appear especially unattractive, subjects such as mathematics, biology, or chemistry have better chances at attracting women. Research has mostly ne...

Diagnostische Zielsetzung: Der Thinking Styles Inventory for German Speaking Samples (TSI-GER; Berding, Masemann, Rebmann & Pächter, 2016) ist ein standardisierter Fragebogen zur Erfassung individueller Präferenzen in der Konstruktion von Wissen und im Umgang mit Aufgaben. Aufbau: Der Fragebogen TSI-GER-13 auf Basis des Stilmodells nach Sternberg (...

Objective: The current study investigated gender differences with a focus on mood, personality characteristics, sleepiness/alertness and cognitive measures in a group of 103 clinically diagnosed burnout patients, who were enrolled in a five week rehabilitation program in specialized centers in Austria. Methods: Patients completed a series of qu...

Die Entscheidung für einen Beruf stellt eine zentrale Entwicklungsaufgabe dar. Jugendliche sollen in diesem Prozess Klarheit über die eigenen Fähigkeiten und Interessen erwerben, berufliche Perspektiven abwägen und mit den eigenen Rollenvorstellungen in Einklang bringen. Berufsentscheidungen werden dabei nicht immer vor dem Hintergrund der Passung...

While some students try to give their best in an achievement situation, others show disengagement and just want to get the situation over and done with. The present study investigates the role of students’ tendencies for approach or avoidance motivation while anticipating tasks and the corresponding activation of the approach/avoidance motivational...

Abstract Diagnostische Zielsetzung: Der Oldenburg Epistemic Beliefs Questionnaire (OLEQ; Paechter et al., 2013) ist ein standardisierter Fragebogen zur Erfassung individueller Vorstellungen über Wissen, Wissenserwerb und Lernen auf einer allgemeinen, domänen- und themenunabhängigen Ebene. Aufbau: Der Fragebogen umfasst 20 empirisch geprüfte Items,...

Anxiety disorders are some of the most widespread mental health issues worldwide. In educational settings, individuals may suffer from specific forms of test and performance anxiety that are connected to a knowledge domain. Unquestionably, the most prominent of these is math anxiety. Math anxiety is a widespread problem for all ages across the glob...

The experience of social exclusion may provoke prosocial, avoidant, or antisocial (aggressive) behaviors. Multiple situational and personal factors seem to affect which course of action people adopt, and to which degree. The present study examined the relevance of the most spontaneous initiation of more passive, avoidant (disengagement) or action-o...

Background Burnout is generally perceived a unified disorder with homogeneous symptomatology across people (exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy). However, increasing evidence points to intra-individual patterns of burnout symptoms in non-clinical samples such as students, athletes, healthy, and burned-out employees. Different bu...

Lecture podcasts are considered an efficient means for passing on learning contents to students, most notably in lectures with large numbers of students. Here, the lecturer’s presentation, combined with lecture slides, is recorded and broadcasted in video form. The present study investigates how students organize learning when they have the choice...

Im Zentrum dieses Beitrages stehen die Berufsfindungsprozesse angehender Lehrlinge an steirischen Polytechnischen Schulen. Diese folgen häufig tradierten Rollenbildern, woraus sich eine Zweiteilung in "typisch" weibliche Lehrberufe und "typisch" männliche Lehrberufe ergibt. Das gegenständliche Forschungsvorhaben nähert sich diesem Problemfeld mitte...

Ausgewählte Projektergebnisse

Recent efforts in the science education community have highlighted the need to integrate research and theory from science communication research into more general science education scholarship. These synthesized research perspectives are relatively novel but serve an important need to better understand the impacts that the advent of rapidly emergin...

In many social science majors, e.g., psychology, students report high levels of statistics anxiety. However, these majors are often chosen by students who are less prone to mathematics and who might have experienced difficulties and unpleasant feelings in their mathematics courses at school. The present study investigates whether statistics anxiety...

Objectives: In past research, burnout subtypes have been discussed. Farber (1990) suggested a frenetic, an underchallenged, and a worn-out subtype. Moreover, there is growing evidence that burnout is also prevalent in university students. The aim of this study is therefore A) to investigate if the subtypes proposed by Farber exist in university stu...

It's possible to assume that women who study STEM topics with a low proportion of females have successfully overcome barriers in school and the family, making them less prone to stereotypic views, and influences. The present study focuses on these kinds of factors and analyzes to which degree family factors, school-related factors, and individual s...

Im Schuljahr 2015/2016 wurde auf Initiative des Bundesministeriums für Bildung das Projekt „Mobile Learning. Peer-Learning Projekte mit Tablets.“ durchgeführt. Lehrerinnen und Lehrer aus allen Schularten, aus Primar- und Sekundarstufe, entwickelten Best-Practice-Beispiele für den Einsatz von Tablets und erprobten diese in ihrem Unterricht. Wissensc...

Prospective studies indicated that heart rate recovery from mildly stressful laboratory tasks can predict cardiovascular health years later. This is only reasonable if patterns of cardiac recovery in the laboratory are closely related to the way individuals typically recover from ordinary psychological demands occurring repeatedly in their everyday...

Begabung wird als Voraussetzung dafür gesehen, dass in Schule und Beruf nicht nur gute, sondern außergewöhnliche Leistungen erbracht werden. Aber reicht Begabung allein aus, um Außergewöhnliches zu leisten und Erfolg zu haben? Der vorliegende Artikel befasst sich mit Merkmalen, die die Erbringung von Leistungen auf überdurchschnittlichem – aber auc...

The Thinking Styles Inventories (TSI) are questionnaires for assessing individual preferences in constructingknowledge. This paper identifies several problems concerning their validity, which range from an inadequate use offactor analysis, to missing information on the measurement model, to findings indicating a low discriminationbetween the thinki...

Die Entscheidung für einen Beruf stellt eine Entwicklungsaufgabe dar, die mit dem Erwerb von Kompetenzen verbunden ist. Berufsentscheidungen erfolgen in Auseinandersetzung mit dem sozialen Umfeld und vor dem Hintergrund von Geschlechtsstereotypen. Um geschlechtsunabhängige Berufsentscheidungen fördern zu können, kommt der schulischen Berufsorientie...

Summer vacations interrupt the rhythm of learning and may result in a loss of knowledge and skills. This study investigates summer learning losses in an Austrian sample with nine-week summer vacations. The results show losses as well as gains for students in lower secondary education (182 students between 10 and 12 years old). Students experienced...

Changes in Cognitive Abilities Over the Course of the Summer Vacation US-American studies show that the summer vacations interrupt the rhythm of learning and that they may result in a loss of cognitive abilities. This learning loss is moderated by the socioeconomic status of the students’ families. In Europe only few studies investigated the summe...

Statistics anxiety describes the apprehension that occurs when an individual is exposed to statistics content or problems and instructional situations, or evaluative contexts that deal with statistics. As statistics-anxious individuals always experience anxiety when doing statistics, statistics anxiety describes an enduring, habitual type of anxiet...

In their workaday life, teachers are faced with multiple complex tasks. How they carry out these tasks is also influenced by their epistemic beliefs and the beliefs they assume their pupils hold. In an empirical study, pre-service teachers’ epistemic beliefs and those they assume of their pupils were investigated in the setting of teacher education...

Focus and rationale: The Thinking Styles Inventories are widely used instruments to evaluate intellectual styles. They were translated into several languages, e.g. Spanish, Norwegian, Chinese, and Turkish. However, up to date a German version is missing. Research aims: Against this background, the present study aims to develop and validate a Germa...

Macher, D., Paechter, M. & Papousek, I. (2015). STARS-D. Statistics Anxiety Rating Scale - deutsche Fassung. In Leibniz-Zentrum für Psychologische Information und Dokumentation (ZPID) (Hrsg.), PSYNDEX Tests. Datenbanksegment Psychologischer und Pädagogischer Testverfahren (Dok.-Nr.: 9006906). Trier: ZPID. Der STARS-D eignet sich für Forschungszwec...

The present study investigated whether students' academic goal orientation (learning goals, performance goals, work avoidance) and their individual competence beliefs (their academic self-concept) can predict motivation-related cardiovascular activation patterns in a demanding performance situation. A sample of seventy-two undergraduate students ra...

Altogether, 379 students from 12 pre-vocational-schools took part in a survey on their interests, school- and job-related self-efficacy and support. Furthermore, they provided information about their aspired occupations; the occupations aspired by their peers, and their parents’ occupations. Congruence indices between aspired occupation and interes...

This contribution analyses influences on the career choice of female STEM students. It focuses on the STEM-specific academic self-concept and on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation as a basis for students’ decision for an academic subject. It analyzes to which degree social support, stereotypes, school factors, and the proportion of females in a stu...

This article describes a competence model for vocational schools in Austria and corresponding learning tasks which foster the development of social and personal competences. It was investigated how teachers and students evaluate the learning tasks. Even though the results show no differences between girls and boys in the evaluation of the tasks an...

Die Entscheidung für einen Bildungsweg ist ein Lern- und Entwicklungsprozess, der unweigerlich mit dem Erwerb von Kompetenzen verbunden ist. Junge Menschen sollen dabei Klarheit über die eigenen Selbstwirksamkeitserwartungen und Interessen erwerben (Holland 1997; Lent et al. 1994) sowie berufliche Perspektiven gegeneinander abwägen und mit der eige...

The way teachers accomplish tasks and assignments in their work environment is also influenced by their epistemic beliefs and the beliefs they assume their learners have (e.g., Brownlee, 2004; Feucht, 2010). Despite the importance of knowing pre-service teachers’ epistemic beliefs for developmental purposes, little research thus far has focused on...

A large proportion of students identify statistics courses as the most anxiety-inducing courses in their curriculum. Many students feel impaired by feelings of state anxiety in the examination and therefore probably show lower achievements. The study investigates how statistics anxiety, attitudes (e.g., interest, mathematical self-concept) and trai...

Altogether, 2,196 students from 29 Austrian universities took part in an empirical investigation on learning and communication in e-learning courses. The students completed a questionnaire on their experiences in an actual e-learning course, on their perceived learning achievements, and their enjoyment of the course. Furthermore, they expressed the...

Editorial 2013 | Niclas Schaper (Paderborn), Tobias Schlömer (Oldenburg) & Manuela Paechter (Graz)

The present research describes the development of a German questionnaire for measurement of domain-general epistemic beliefs. Pre-studies on the psychometric properties of a German version of the Epistemic Beliefs Inventory (EBI) had emphasized the necessity to develop an instrument that is especially constructed for German-speaking samples. The ne...

The present study investigated the relationship between statistics anxiety, individual characteristics (e.g., trait anxiety and learning strategies), and academic performance. Students enrolled in a statistics course in psychology (N = 147) filled in a questionnaire on statistics anxiety, trait anxiety, interest in statistics, mathematical self-con...

Editorial 2012 | Niclas Schaper (Paderborn), Tobias Schlömer (Oldenburg) & Manuela Paechter (Graz)

m Zuge von Schulleistungsstudien wurden in den letzten Jahren zahlreiche Konzepte entwickelt, wie man insbesondere fachliche Kompetenzen messen und erfassen kann. Wie aber sieht ein Unterricht aus, der die Lernvoraussetzungen der Schüler/innen berücksichtigt und ihren Kompetenzerwerb unterstützt? Dieses Handbuch behandelt • die aktuellen Ergebnis...

The Statistics Anxiety Rating Scale (STARS) was adapted into German to examine its psychometric properties (n = 400). Two validation studies (n = 66, n = 96) were conducted to examine its criterion-related validity. The psychometric properties of the questionnaire were very similar to those previously reported for the original English version in va...

The identification of individual differences variables and environmental conditions that may be associated with poor psychophysiological recovery from stress or may serve as protective factors may be relevant in the context of physical and psychological health maintenance. In the present study, heart rate recovery from a mental arithmetic task was...

BACKGROUND. Teachers' judgments of student performance on a standardized achievement test often result in an overestimation of students' abilities. In the majority of cases, a larger group of overestimated students and a smaller group of underestimated students are formed by these judgments. AIMS. In this research study, the consequences of the und...

The main concepts of instruction in the virtual university, virtual seminars and virtual lectures, are explained and illustrated by examples. Then, based on a model of instruction two important aspects and often obstacles to successful learning on the net are investigated more closely: communication and self-regulation of learning. The former aspec...

Metric scale is an important concept taught as part of science curricula across different countries. This study explored metric and relative (body-length) scale concepts of inservice (N = 92) and preservice (N = 134) teachers from Austria, and Taiwan, and their concepts were compared with those of teachers from the USA. Participants completed three...

Die durch den Bologna-Prozess initiierten Veranderungen in der Studienplanentwicklung in Europa lenken den Blick auf die Ergebnisse von Bildungsprozessen als Beschreibungsmerkmale fur Lehrqualitat. Mit Blick auf diese Veranderungen wurde ein neues Lehrevaluationsinstrument entwickelt, das den Kompetenzerwerb durch Selbsteinschatzungen der Studieren...

As compared to negative affect, only a small number of studies have examined influences of positive affect on cardiovascular stress responses, of which only a few were concerned with cardiovascular recovery. In this study, heart rate, low- and high-frequency heart rate variability, blood pressure, and levels of subjectively experienced stress were...

Within only a few years, the use of e-learning has increased rapidly in Austria. In certain subjects, up to 60% of university students report using e-learning platforms at least ‘sometimes’ or ‘frequently’ (Unger & Wroblewski, 2006). Yet, which aspects of e-learning do students consider important for their learning achievements and course satisfact...

In the science curricula of various countries, scale receives an important place in middle as well as in high school science education. This study explored scale concepts of inservice and preservice teachers from three countries, Austria, Taiwan, and the USA. Accuracy of scale concepts differed in the samples of the three countries. The Austrian an...

Working together in a group may lead to advantages such as a higher task performance, gains in individual knowledge or social skills, or a higher motivation. In many situations of our daily life, the members of a group cannot meet face-to-face to work together but have to rely on communication media. This paper focuses on collaboration with the sup...

The QIBB quality initiative was specifically developed for the vocational training system in Austria. The quality system is distinctive in that it includes both objectives and survey instruments designed to address the specific concerns of vocational training. There are general quality concepts and instruments that are common to all schools and oth...