Regina Jucks

• Prof. Dr.
• Head of Department at University of Münster

Generative AI systems like chatbots are increasingly being introduced into learning, teaching and assessment scenarios at universities. While previous research suggests that users treat chatbots like humans, computer systems are still often perceived as less trustworthy, potentially impairing their usefulness in learning contexts. How are processes...

Addressing the existential threat posed by climate change requires urgent actions, both on an individual level and on a policy level. In the present research, we applied an emotion-based persuasion appeal model to climate change mitigation to test the effect of climate mitigation appeals formulated with different levels of threat (high vs. low) and...

Wissenschaftsdidaktik ist nicht auf ein grundständiges wissenschaftliches Studium beschränkt. Vielmehr befasst sie sich auch mit der Vermittlung und Kommunikation von Wissenschaft in außerhochschulischen Feldern, wendet sich an unterschiedliche Zielgruppen und erfüllt verschiedene gesellschaftliche Funktionen. Damit berührt die Wissenschaftsdidakti...

In the context of science communication, complexity is often reduced. This study employs a 2 × 2 experimental design (N = 432) to investigate how two factors, namely the communication of complexity (reduced vs not reduced) and the provision of suggestions for concrete action (suggested vs not suggested), influence individuals' productive engagement...

Preservice teachers study an academic discipline (e.g. mathematics) and – just like students majoring in that discipline – have a certain level of connectedness to it. While studying, students may compare themselves to peers studying the same discipline within alternative degree programs, characterized by different study contexts. Notably, preservi...

Public and private decision-making on health problems relies on scientific evidence. However, scientific knowledge includes uncertainty, as does knowledge about COVID-19. In an experimental study, we tested how the trustworthiness (on the three dimensions expertise, integrity, and benevolence) of a source of information (either a scientist or a pol...

In academic teacher education, preservice teachers may develop complex views on their chosen scientific discipline of study, as a tension may exist between a purely academic focus and a job-related focus. This study reports quantitative data from N 1⁄4 259 preservice mathematics teachers indicating their views on the mathematics discipline in four...

A central aspect of scientific knowledge is scientific uncertainty. When scientists touch upon political issues, there are two contrary expectations: One is that scientists communicate in a straightforward manner and give a direct, concrete suggestion. The other is that they communicate in a way that carefully considers the pros and cons as well as...

Objective We investigated how individuals deal with the limits of their own knowledge and productively cope with their dependence on experts as they engage with the socio-scientific topic of nuclear energy. We scrutinized the effects of content features of an interview text and of individuals’ communicative engagement with the information read. Me...

When individuals in our knowledge society assess the extent of their own knowledge, they may overestimate what they actually know. But, this knowledge illusion can be reduced when people are prompted to explain the content. To investigate whether this holds true for written self-explanations about science phenomena this study transfers the Illusion...

Scientific knowledge is intrinsically uncertain; hence, it can only provide a tentative orientation for political decisions. One illustrative example is the discussion that has taken place on introducing mandatory mask-wearing to contain the coronavirus. In this context, this study investigates how the communication of uncertainty regarding the eff...

This dataset belongs to a large-scale educational intervention project introducing cultural literacy learning in schools. The dataset includes transcribed dialogic interactions from 111 lessons conducted in classrooms of five countries: England, Portugal, Germany, Spain, and Cyprus. The lessons were part of the same Cultural Literacy Learning Progr...

The occurrence of COVID-19 has a strong impact on individuals’ as well as public life. This Special Issue brings together research on language and communication addressing the challenges resulting from the Corona virus situation. Seven original papers followed by a discussion, address research on language and communication related to COVID-19 using...

In modern societies, one main goal for educated citizens and educators is to pursue scientific literacy. However, given the high complexity of scientific information and the fact that no single person can rely solely on their own knowledge when making science-related decisions, achieving scientific literacy is not straightforward: This chapter focu...

Small group work offers the opportunity for students to engage in many-sided discussions. Students can learn how to argue standpoints and develop argumentative competence (i.e. learning to argue ) but may also, by using argumentative structures, learn about and tease apart relevant facets of the topic at hand (i.e. arguing to learn ). Although thes...

Scientific debates are, in an epistemological sense, argumentative approaches aimed at coming to the most appropriate conclusion. However, as these debates sometimes involve interpersonal rather than content-driven attacks (e.g., an argument between scientific experts might involve personal dislike), the following question arises: How do such commu...

Many urgent problems that societies currently face—from climate change to a global pandemic—require citizens to engage with scientific information as members of democratic societies as well as to solve problems in their personal lives. Most often, to solve their epistemic aims (aims directed at achieving knowledge and understanding) regarding such...

Science’s role in society is being threatened, as misinterpretation and denial of scientific evidence and the rejection or ignorance of scientific expertise are gaining prominence. This endangered role of science in society is characteristic of post-truthism. To deconstruct this process, we analyze how three potential gateways allow people to disco...

published in Media and Communication. Even though a main goal of science is to reduce the uncertainty in scientific results by applying ever-improving research methods, epistemic uncertainty is an integral part of science. As such, while uncertainty might be communicated in news articles about climate science, climate skeptics have also exploited...

Background When searching for health information, many people use the internet as their first source of information. In online health forums, for example, users post their questions and exchange health advice. In recent years, information givers from various professions have begun to use positive language (indicated by the frequent use of positivel...

Background: To decide whether online health information is reliable, information seekers apply 2 stretegies: first, information seekers can make credibility judgments by using their prior knowledge to evaluate the validity of the encountered health claim. Second, instead of evaluating the health claim itself, information seekers can make trustworth...

This study aimed at investigating whether doctoral students are already confronted with expectations that reflect a primacy of research and whether they adopt such views for themselves. There is a consensus among academics in the university system that research is typically valued more strongly than teaching in terms of prestige, rewards, and caree...

An academic career in psychology typically begins with a role reversal: young academics, who were only recently being taught, become doctoral researchers and teachers. Studies at two German universities provide insights into how students and early-career academics (ecas) in psychology view research and teaching and how their perspectives might diff...

Purpose Developing professional identities as both researchers and teachers is core to doctoral students’ growth. Given the primacy of research for the university career, this study aimed at answering the following questions: how much do doctoral students identify with the teacher compared to the researcher role? Can the teacher role identity be p...

We investigated how recipients disentangle social and content-related cues in physicians’ communication. We presented 53 students with four different statements by physicians concerning the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. In a 2 × 2 within-subject design, we manipulated politeness and the use of technical terms. We expected politeness variations to...

Current scientific debates, such as on climate change, often involve emotional, hostile, and aggressive rhetorical styles. Those who read or listen to these kinds of scientific arguments have to decide whom they can trust and which information is credible. This study investigates how the language style (neutral vs aggressive) and the professional a...

Since most of the Internet is not governed by editors, the validity of online information cannot be guaranteed. Therefore, information seekers have to decide whether they should accept knowledge claims they encounter online. This study analyses how information seekers' judgements of a source's credibility, trustworthiness, and instructional quality...

see a pre-print version of the manuscript (accepted in i-JMR) https://preprints.jmir.org/preprint/10282/accepted BACKGROUND: Online, health information seekers need to identify criteria that indicate who and what information they can rely on. According to Language Expectancy Theory (LET) and Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), the communicat...

Cyberbullying unter SchülerInnen passiert in einem sozialen Gefüge, in dem verschiedene Beteiligte unterschiedliche Rollen einnehmen. Im Sinne der Prävention geraten zunehmend die eher unbeteiligten bystander in den Blick. Da Unterhaltungen in digitalen Medien oft öffentlich sind, könnten diese ohne Weiteres auf solche Vorfälle reagieren. In diesem...

Based on a heuristic approach to information processing, thematic reference of YouTube’s sidebars and YouTuber’s linguistic style are viewed as cues that should impact viewers’ evaluation of videos. In this study, a 2 × 2 online experiment was conducted wherein these factors were varied systematically for a video about nutrition myths. 147 particip...

Communicating with spoken dialogue systems (SDS) such as Apple’s Siri® and Google’s Now is becoming more and more common. We report a study that manipulates an SDS’s word use with regard to politeness. In an experiment, 58 young adults evaluated the spoken messages of our self-developed SDS as it replied to typical questions posed by university fre...

If learning materials are presented in either a conversational or formal language style, people will process them differently. This study reports an experiment in which 64 high school students watched an educational video in a massive open online course scenario in which the instructions were phrased either conversationally or formally. The video d...

Massive open online courses are increasingly popular. One characteristic of most massive open online courses is that they are offering educational contents to masses of different individual learners. At the same time, a particular challenge for the individual learner could be the massiveness of such courses, that is, that one is part of a large cro...

Many debates in higher education center around the role of approaches to teaching (measured with ATI-R) and impact of academic disciplines (soft vs. hard) on teaching practice, e.g. advice giving. An online study with N = 70 academic teachers was conducted and the advice given was content analyzed. Regression analyses showed that academics with a h...

One of many ways in which spoken dialogue systems (SDS) are becoming more and more flexible is in their choice of words (e.g. alignment to the user’s vocabulary). We examined how users perceive such adaptive and non-adaptive SDS regarding trustworthiness and usability. In Experiment 1, 130 participants read out questions to an SDS that either made...

BACKGROUND According to the language expectancy theory and the communication accommodation theory, health information seekers’ trust evaluations of Web-based videos are determined by interplays between content and seekers’ expectations on vloggers’ appropriate language use in specific contexts of Web-based communication. OBJECTIVES Two investigati...

Background: Online health forums are widely used, but the quality of advice differs as much as the knowledge backgrounds of the audience members who receive the advice. It is important to understand how people judge the information given online. In line with the communication accommodation theory (CAT), online forums represent specific social cont...

One way teachers show professionalism in their interactions with parents is by having knowledge of and refl ecting the parents' perspective on what constitutes eff ective teaching and learning. These assumptions guide teacher-parent communication. This article compares the beliefs about teaching-concerning teacher oriented and learner-oriented beli...

Vortrag auf der PAEPSY Tagung 2017, Münster

Cyberbullying, also das Ärgern, Ausgrenzen oder Nötigen unter Schülern über digitale Medien, passiert wie Schulbullying nicht nur zwischen einem Täter und einem Opfer, sondern in einem sozialen Gefüge, in dem die Beteiligten unterschiedliche Rollen einnehmen. Im Sinne der Prävention geraten zunehmend die mehr oder weniger unbeteiligten bystander in...

In higher education, just amounts of tuition fees are often a topic of heated debate among different groups such as students, university teachers, administrative staff, and policymakers. We investigated whether unpleasant situations that students often experience at university due to social crowding can affect students’ views on the justified amoun...

This article examines how the way pro and contra information is distributed between two experts in a written discourse influence readers’ evaluations. One hundred and fifty university students read an expert discussion on the topic of computer use in childhood. Information was presented in either a one-sided (each expert holds one position: pro or...

The digital age has changed how we communicate, inform ourselves, and even how we teach and learn. This study systematically analyses and compares the perspectives of university academics (N = 75) and university students (N = 206) from the field of teacher education on digitized teaching and learning. In a between-subjects design, participants of b...

In Germany, most PhD psychology students are engaged in research and teach as well. As a result, they may experience both synergy and competition between these two activities. How do PhD psychology students themselves perceive the relationship between research and teaching? And how does this perception depend on their conceptions of research and te...

This study examines how academics and students from different disciplines perceive teaching and knowledge acquisition. University academics and students from both hard and soft disciplines completed the Domain-specific Epistemological Beliefs Questionnaire and the Approaches to Teaching Inventory. Results showed that academics held more student-/le...

Online health forums offer many cues such as who evaluated a certain piece of information and how many users have assessed the contribution. These cues help information seekers to answer questions of trust, e.g. whom and which information to rely on. This study seeks to determine the effect of social validation on trusting online health information...

People adapt their word choice to both humans and computers. In this study, language style (elaborated vs. restricted) and perceived conversational partner (human vs. spoken dialogue system) were varied. Convergence was greater when reacting to a restricted language style. Participants preferred human partners and an elaborated language style. In l...

In the present experiment, participants read about the presence of many versus few others in typical student-life situations. They subsequently wrote an essay about their perspectives on learning in groups. Using the program Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to analyze these essays signified that participants who read prompts that involved many (vs...

This chapter provides insights concerning different psychological and communicational challenges that come into play when teachers communicate with individual students in one-on-one interaction. At every level of education and training – from early school years through adulthood – much meaningful instruction takes place in the context of advising,...

Today, many people use the Internet to seek health advice. This study examines how an author's expertise is established and how this affects the credibility of his or her online health information. In a 2 (authors' credentials: medical vs. nonmedical) × 2 (authors' language use: technical vs. every day) within-subjects design, 127 study participant...

Instructional strategies such as prompts, requests for clarification, and explicit feedback counter social desires of autonomy and appreciation, i.e., they threaten the face of their receiver. We report an online experiment on how readers perceive instructional face threats and what they accept as appropriate. One hundred and twenty three participa...

Critical questioning is crucial for being able to successfully construct knowledge within collaborative argumentation on science-related issues. Regrettably, laypeople often lack the required skills and intrinsic motivation to do so. In a 1 × 2 between-subjects design (training vs. no training), the present study investigated if training the member...

Ist Zustimmung oder Dissens besser? Die Rolle des Kritischen Hinterfragens und Elaborierens im Argumentativen Diskurs Zusammenfassung. Beim Umgang mit wissenschaftsbezogenen Informationen im Internet spielt der argumentative Austausch mit anderen eine immer zentralere Rolle. Als besonders förderlich für den Wissenserwerb durch argumentativen Diskur...

Lernen im Diskurs: Wie das Argumentieren über wissenschaftsbezogene Informationen zum Lernerfolg beiträgt Zusammenfassung. Lernen, ob innerhalb oder ausserhalb von formalen Bildungssettings, ist oft eine soziale Aktivität. Wissenschaftsbezogene Informationen, d. h. solche die auf wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis basieren, werden mit dem Ziel verarbeit...

There is more to words than just the meanings they convey. Especially in online settings in which information about others is limited, the words employed play an important role in assessing an interlocutor’s trustworthiness. Therefore, based on ability, benevolence, and integrity as the components of trustworthiness, we investigated word usage in t...

In der psychologischen Expertiseforschung gibt es zwei Auffassungen dazu, was ein ‚Experte' ist: Nach der einen Definition ist ein Experte ein Spitzenkönner in seiner Domäne, und es ist ein Zeitraum von mindestens zehn Jahren intensivster Beschäftigung und Übung erforderlich, um den Expertenstatus zu erreichen (Feltovich; Prietula & Ericsson 2006)....

Contemporary school learning typically includes the processing of popular scientific information as found in journals, magazines, and/or the WWW. The German high school curriculum emphasizes that students should have achieved science literacy and have learned to evaluate the substance of text-based learning content by the end of high school. Alongs...

Establishing privacy is a key demand in interpersonal online communication. Do people regulate their privacy through self-disclosure regarding specific interlocutors and privacy contexts? One hundred and fifty-seven participants answered an inquiry in a 2 (communication situation: public vs. private) × 2 (interlocutor's self-disclosure: high vs. lo...

There are clear differences in the way written information on health issues presents research findings. In some cases, the source of a piece of information (e.g. "expert professor") is highlighted to emphasize its credibility and relevance. In other cases, the impact of a certain argument is stressed by avoiding hints on tentativeness such as "most...

Lernende werden in Instruktionssituationen zwangsläufig mit ihren Fehlkonzeptionen und Wissenslücken konfrontiert. Lehrende gefährden durch Einsatz von Strategien wie Aufforderungen, Fragestrategien und explizitem Feedback die Bedürfnisse der Lernenden nach Autonomie (negative face) und sozialer Wertschätzung (positive face). In der Terminologie de...

Online instructional communication, as found in ask-an-expert forums, e-learning discussion boards or online help desks, creates situations that threaten the recipient's face. This study analyzed the evaluation of face-threatening acts with a 1×3 design. An online forum thread confronted a layperson with an expert who either (a) addressed the laype...

A significant amount of communication between lecturers and students takes place via e-mail. This study provides evidence that two types of cultural cues contained in the e-mail impacts lecturers' linguistic adaptation to, and appraisal of, the student. A total of 186 psychology lecturers from universities in Germany answered a fictitious student's...

Combining psycholinguistic and social psychological research the current study contributes to the debate on audience adaptation during language production. By varying the valence and source of information available to a speaker a critical test for audience specific adaptation was conducted. Results indicate that participants (N = 88) used any infor...

Responding to misconceptions is an essential part of adaptive instruction. Nevertheless, research on both tutoring and expert–layperson communication has identified at least two problems that online counselors share with both face-to-face and online tutors. First, they generally do not notice when laypersons’ understanding differs from correct cont...

Seeing the need to change parts of one's teaching project may be the starting point for scholars to seek inspiration and guidance from educational psychologists for innovation in their teaching. In this report, the authors address the question of how educational psychologists can assist lecturers in higher education with the implementation of innov...

Reflecting ones own conceptions of teaching is assumed a prerequisite of quality teaching (e.g. Kreber & Castleden, 2009, Mälkki & Lindblom-Ylänne, 2012) and a central perspective on professionalization in university teaching (Amundsen & Wilson, 2012). The academic discipline and its epistemological structure plays an important role for the social...

The internet has become a social environment, where people exchange personal information. Online media have a crucial role in these online communication settings as they address different audiences and thereby provide different levels of privacy. In communication settings, privacy is regulated by disclosing more or less personal information. Invers...

Many tutorial strategies are impolite. They threaten the tutees’ face by restricting autonomy or neglecting the desire for social appreciation. We investigated whether the tutoring’s content domain influences the perceived appropriateness of instructional face threats. In addition the kind of face threat varied with regard to its explicitness. Whil...

Der Text beschreibt die Messung von Lehrorientierungen durch ein offenes Antwortformat. Lehrende (n = 71) und Studierende (n = 276) der Universität Münster führten den Satzanfang "Für gute Lehre ist es aus meiner Sicht wichtig, dass ..." fort. Die in den Ausführungen genannten Aspekte wurden inhaltsanalytisch (MAYRING, 2010) entlang des Modells zu...

This study investigated how varying the lexical encodings of technical terms in multiple texts influences learners' dyadic processing of scientific-related information. Fifty-seven pairs of college students read journalistic texts on depression. Each partner in a dyad received one text; for half of the dyads the partner's text contained different l...

Although tutoring is very effective, tutors often neglect certain strategies such as direct negative feedback. This might be because they want to avoid threatening their tutee's face. The concept of face derives from politeness theory and refers to the aspects of autonomy and social appreciation people claim for themselves and strive to negotiate c...

Schreiben hat positive Effekte auf die Auseinandersetzung mit und Aneignung von Lerninhalten (ein Überblick bei TYNJÄLÄ, MASON & LONKA, 2001; BANGERT-DROWNS, HURLEY & WILKONSON, 2004). In der Hochschullehre bietet das Lernen durch Schreiben einen vielversprechenden Ansatz, um den Wissens- und Erkenntnisgewinn von Studierenden in einem selbstregulie...

Reflecting ones own conceptions of teaching is a central perspective on professionalization in university teaching (Amundsen & Wilson, 2012). The present study addresses conceptions of teaching and asks two interrelated questions: (1) How do conceptions of teaching diverge in so called soft versus hard disciplines? (2) And how do epistemological be...

Using the same specialist terms in online discourse can indicate knowledge overlaps between partners. However, linguistic overlaps do not automatically ensure overlaps in conceptual representations. In particular, learning situations, which typically focus on knowledge acquisition, require a sufficient understanding of domain-specific concepts. Thi...

Tutors often fail to address learners' misconceptions. Although this may indicate a failure to grasp these misconceptions, it may simply be due to a wish to be polite and save the learner's face. In this study we examined whether instructing tutors about the pitfalls of politeness could increase the clarity and precision of their tutorial communica...

In der psychologischen Statistik-Ausbildung werden häufig tutorielle Begleitveranstaltungen oder informelles Tutoring von Studierenden angeboten. Tutoring ist eine äußerst effektive Instruktionsform, die bis zu zwei Standardabweichungen größere Lernzuwächse ermöglicht als herkömmliche Lernformen (Bloom, 1984; Graesser, D’Mello, & Cade, 2010). Ermög...

Although learning through discourse activities seems well-documented, it is unclear which mechanisms and behavioral variables are involved. What exactly contributes to learning when two or more learners interact in online learning environments? To analyze interrelations between central discourse activities and individual learning outcomes at the le...

People exchange information and seek advice from peers more and more online. In written computer mediated communication (CMC) cues to intentions and attitudes of interlocutors are lacking, thus, word choice and linguistic expression become central in gathering information about the sender of information. There is broad evidence for effects of self-...

To examine how physicians use information about a patient's background knowledge when both anticipating what a patient knows and producing actual answers in an email counseling setting. A fictitious patient used a (high vs. low) level of technical jargon in an email inquiry about diabetes and provided explicit information on prior knowledge (high v...

Zu Lehren gehört traditionell zu den grundlegenden Aufgabenbereichen der meisten Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler an deutschen Hochschulen. Dennoch bedarf dieser Bereich einer Professionalisierung, d.h. einer Entwicklung hin zu einer reflektier- ten und fundierten Tätigkeit. Ein Bestandteil der Professionalisierung sind Angebote zur Weiterq...

Tutoring ist eine nachgewiesen wirksame Instruktionsform. Neben motivationalen Effekten wirken sich vor allem auf Berücksichtigung des Wissensstands des Tutees basierende, sprachliche Anpassungen des Tutors lernförderlich aus. Detailanalysen des Kommunikationsverhaltens von Tutoren zeigen jedoch, dass sie Fehler des Tutees nur selten explizit zurüc...

Tutoring ist eine nachgewiesen effektive Instruktionsform. Die Tutoringforschung der letzten 20 Jahre hat diejenigen tutoriellen Strategien herausstellen können, die in besonderem Maße zu Lernerfolg führen (Graesser, Person, & Magliano, 1995; Lepper & Woolverton, 2002). Dennoch zeigen viele Studien, dass Tutoren – vor allem unerfahrene – diese wirk...

Learning from texts requires reflection on how far one has mastered the material. Learners use such metacognitive processes to decide whether to engage in deeper learning activities or not. This article examines how the lexical surface of specialist concepts influences their mental representation. Lexical encodings that are the concise wordings of...

This article examines which features of computer-mediated communication make perspective taking more demanding in online instructional settings compared with face-to-face situations. The first part presents the theoretical basis: It uses research on expertise to gain insights into the instructor’s perspective, and research from psycholinguistics an...

In this paper, we report results of an online-study with 186 university lecturers teaching Psychology courses at German universities. The task was to respond to an email request of a student. The nationality of the requesting student (German vs. Chinese), the communication style of the request (Western vs. Asian), as well as the use of certain word...

To ensure a complex understanding of the topics addressed in collaborative learning scenarios, learners have to develop a conceptual understanding of the relevant specialist vocabulary. To this end, they have to exchange and discuss their individual knowledge, which is usually gained through individual exploration of different learning materials. B...

Overlaps with one's interlocutor in the choice of words are called lexical entrainment. This article looks at accounts for these overlaps in word use. The question addressed is the extent to which the word use of the addressee, as opposed to available words from other sources, has a special impact on experts' choice of words. A laboratory experimen...

This paper explores lay understanding of illnesses related to the metabolic syndrome (MetS), a constellation of metabolic derailments associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular diseases. Because lifestyle factors play an important role in preventing the metabolic syndrome, physicians need to convey the need for lifestyle changes to their patie...

This study analyses how the exchange of text specific information in virtual cooperative writing can be improved. Based on findings concerning the automatic absorption of words in written communication (lexical alignment), we conducted a study with 64 students to determine whether there was a positive impact of the use of different terminology on t...

We report two experimental studies on the potentially detrimental effects of nonshared, external representations in an instructional setting. Domain experts viewing an external representation responded to E-mail inquires for medical advice written by people who were unable to see this external representation. Based on research on expert–layperson c...

As more and more doctor-patient communication is happening online, it is important to know how doctors adapt to their patients' knowledge level and ensure that they make themselves understood in this medium. This article examined question-answer sets from health archives to see whether medical experts adapted their answers to the way laypersons ver...