Tim N. Höffler

IPN – Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education, Kiel, Germany

Research on the multimedia effect in testing indicates that static representational pictures (RPs) and, potentially, dynamic RPs that further subdivide the picture into segments may support students’ mental processing. This might be especially relevant for mathematical word problems that pose high mental demands in a multistage solution process. Ex...

Interactive computer simulations and hands-on experiments are important teaching methods in modern science education. Especially for the communication of complex current topics with social relevance (socioscientific issues), suitable methods in science education are of great importance. However, previous studies could not sufficiently clarify the e...

Research on science outreach activities is often located in the interface between science communication and science education. The transferability of aims and objectives of one research field to the other offers great potential. The widely recognized aim of ‘trust in science’ in science communication is still less discussed in science education. Ho...

Science competitions are positively linked to students' science career pursuit and admission at top universities. The search for effective gender equity measures has become a priority as girls are less successful during science Olympiad team selection. Based on the expectancy-value model we performed latent profile analysis on a dataset of 445 Chem...

Background Biodiversity is being lost rapidly and its conservation is thus one of the most urgent tasks today. For biodiversity conservation to be successful, the public needs to gain an awareness and understanding of biodiversity and its importance. Moreover, species experts are needed who have the skills necessary for identifying and recording bi...

The primary objective of the current project was to convey authentic science to students in out-of-school student laboratories. High school students have diverse and partially wrong concepts of scientists’ work. To convey more realistic concepts, we developed videos of scientists working on relevant and up to date scientific topics. These videos, c...

Citizen science (CS) is regarded as a promising format in environmental and sustainability education as well as in science education. CS projects often assume that participation in the project influences, for example, participants' knowledge or behaviour. We investigated whether and to what extent biodiversity citizen science (BDCS) projects, from...

Abstract To make informed decisions has been acknowledged as an essential ability to negotiate socioscientific issues. However, many young people show an inadequate understanding of how to make well-informed decisions, particularly in contexts that are connected to environmental problems. This paper aims to explore the effectiveness of an environme...

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of visual/verbal cognitive style and interactivity level in dynamic and non-dynamic multimedia learning environments. A group of 235 biology students learned about photosynthesis either from a computer-based animation or a series of static pictures with spoken explanatory text. Participants were ran...

Girls are underrepresented in mathematical and science Olympiads, global informal learning activities which often serve as stepping stones for admission to top universities and future STEM careers. The present article aims to investigate the role of implicit genderscience stereotypes on representation and achievement among participants of the Germa...

Das Lernen mit Medien ist im Bildungsbereich geradezu zu einem geflügelten Wort geworden. Es ist jedoch kein einheitlicher und klar definierter Begriff, sondern kann aus verschiedenen sowohl kognitiven als auch instruktionalen Perspektiven betrachtet werden. Dieses Kapitel erläutert die verschiedenen Klassifikationsmöglichkeiten für Lernen mit Medi...

Das vorgestellte Gesundheitsbildungsprojekt „Du denkst Zukunft!“ hat zum Ziel, Jugendliche an das aktuelle Thema Morbus Alzheimer heranzuführen und sie über medizinische, naturwissenschaftliche und gesellschaftliche Aspekte dieser weitverbreiteten Demenzform aufzuklären. Mittels eines Projekttages an Schulen sowie einem fakultativen anschließenden...

Stereotypes are simplifications of complex characteristics of groups of persons and are common and widespread through media as well as everyday experiences. Especially regarding occupational groups stereotypes can be a problem because many young people base their occupational choices on these simplified conceptions. It is thus important to comprehe...

Background: Nowadays, scientists not only need to be creative, resourceful, and inventive regarding their researchquestions and need to understand their field and research methods, but also need to know how to teach, how tocatalog, how to fill out proposal forms, and much more. The main goal of this study was to investigate and comparescience inter...

Lay Description What is already known about this topic: Combining text and pictures supports learning and deepens understanding. Learning differs with respect to individual differences and the type of visualization. Visualizers profit from pictorial information more than verbalizers. Unclear what type of visualization and modality is beneficial to...

Gendered patterns in mathematics and science interest emerge in early childhood, develop over time, and ultimately reflect advanced course selection in secondary education. During the crucial time adolescents become aware of their strengths and interests and specialize accordingly, they get the opportunity to participate in out‐of‐school learning p...

Background: Many students have incomplete or incorrect perceptions of science and scientists. These simplified images, mediated by media or influential agents of socialisation, result in common stereotypes. Especially for occupational choices it is important to convey an authentic image about science and scientists. Purpose: One manner to convey an...

Background: This article describes the design and the evaluation of a student lab program on the topic of nanoscience and technology (NST), mainly focusing on Nanoscience and its applications. The program was designed for students in grades 8–10 and was part of a larger outreach program of the Collaborative Research Center ‘Function by Switching’ a...

de Die Vorstellungen Jugendlicher über konkrete naturwissenschaftliche Tätigkeitsfelder und ihre eigenen diesbezüglichen Interessen und Einstellungen werden geprägt durch den naturwissenschaftlichen Unterricht und die Fachlehrerinnen und ‐lehrer als Multiplikatoren und Repräsentanten dieser Domäne. Vorgestellt wird eine Studie, in der an fünf Unive...

Competitions are discussed as a measure to foster students’ interest, especially for highly gifted and talented students. In the current study, participants of a cognitive school competition in science were compared to non-participants of the same age group (14–15) who either did not participate in any competition or who participated in a non-cogni...

Adding pictures to a text is very common in today’s education and might be especially beneficial for elementary school children, whose abilities to read and understand pure text have not yet been fully developed. Our study examined whether adding pictures supports learning of a biology text in fourth grade and whether the text modality (spoken or w...

This study was conducted in order to examine the differences between visualizers and verbalizers in the way they gaze at pictures and texts while learning. Using a collection of questionnaires, college students were classified according to their visual or verbal cognitive style and were asked to learn about two different, in terms of subject and ty...

There is some indication that people differ regarding their visual and verbal cognitive style. The Object-Spatial Imagery and Verbal Questionnaire (OSIVQ) assumes a three-dimensional cognitive style model, which distinguishes between object imagery, spatial imagery and verbal dimensions. Using eye tracking as a means to observe actual gaze behaviou...

Background: Science Olympiads and science fairs are effective instruments to foster interested and talented students. However, at most schools competitions are not systematically integrated into the school mission statement so that students are unaware of these opportunities. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness o...

Considering the reported lack of interest in the STEM-domain and the consequential difficulties in recruiting talented and interested young academics, the development of effective enrichment measures is indispensable. This requires a precise picture of students’ interests. The paper presents an approach to characterize interest profiles in explicit...

A core component of scientific inquiry is the ability to evaluate evidence generated from controlled experiments and then to relate that evidence to a hypothesis or theory. The control-of-variables strategy (CVS) is foundational for school science and scientific literacy, but it does not routinely develop without practice or instruction. This meta-...

This paper investigates the structure of German sixth‐grade students’ interest in science (N = 474; age 11–12 years) by considering different subject‐related contexts (biology, chemistry, and physics) and different activities. Confirmatory factor analysis models were designed to validate the hypothetical structure of interest, connecting the whole...

Students’ views about scientists’ activities constitute a basis for vocational orientation in the field of science. Previous instruments are not able to cover students’ views about the wide field of modern scientists’ activities. This article presents the development and testing of the Nature of Scientists (NoSt)—questionnaire. It contains scales t...

Naturwissenschaftliche Schülerwettbewerbe sind ein wirkungsvolles Instrument zur Erkennung und Förderung begabter Schülerinnen und Schüler. Mit dem Blick auf eine frühe Förderung von interessierten und talentierten Jugendlichen stellt sich jedoch die Frage, welche Merkmale von Schülerinnen und Schüler prädiktiv auf das Interesse an einer Wettbewerb...

Im Rahmen der hier vorgestellten Studie wurden Vorkenntnisse, Einstellungen und Erwartungen von Studienanfängerinnen und Studienanfängern im Fach Chemie untersucht. Für die Erfassung wurden ein strukturgebender Rahmen und ein darauf basierendes domänenbezogenes Testinstrument entwickelt. Ausgehend von dieser theoriegeleiteten Konstruktion werden Ke...

Interesse ist von großer Bedeutung für die Lernmotivation und die spätere Studien- oder Berufswahl. In diesem Beitrag wird der aktuelle Stand der Forschung zum Interesse allgemein und spezifisch an den Naturwissenschaften dargelegt. Ergänzend wird eine Adaption des „RIASEC-Modells“ nach John L. Holland zur Charakterisierung von Interessen in den Na...

In diesem Beitrag werden Ergebnisse einer längsschnittlichen Untersuchung der Effekte des naturwissenschaftlichen Anfangsunterrichts in den Jahrgängen 5 und 6 an nicht-gymnasialen Schulen in Schleswig-Holstein berichtet. Ursprünglich als Untersuchung eines extracurriculären Projekts („NaWi-aktiv“) im Kontrollgruppendesign angelegt, boten die bildun...

Naturwissenschaftsorientierte Wissenschaftsmagazine für Jugendliche sind ein aktuell weit verbreitetes Medium. Welches Interesse Jugendliche jedoch an diesen Magazinen zeigen und inwiefern diese Medien für eine Interessensförderung genutzt werden können, ist weitgehend unerforscht. In diesem Beitrag werden die Ergebnisse einer explorativen Kurzstud...

Background :Interest is assumed to be relevant for students’ learning processes. Many studies have investigated students’ interest in science; most of them however have not offered differentiated insights into the structure and elements of this interest. Purpose :The aim of this study is to obtain a precise image of secondary school students’ inter...

The benefits of visual representations that are added to (written or spoken) words to enhance learning are beyond doubt and have been well-established throughout educational research in the last two decades. In this regard, the preceding chapters have introduced and discussed the cognitive foundations for learning with different kinds of visual rep...

The effects of self-pacing versus system-pacing were examined in different versions of a computer-based learning environment (static pictures/animations). The role of cognitive style was also considered. While the variables investigated did not have a direct impact on either learning outcome or cognitive load, significant interaction effects were f...

Leistungsschwächere Kinder der fünften und sechsten Jahrgangsstufe mit ihren oft unentdeckten und wenig geförderten Talenten sind die Zielgruppe des Projektes NaWi-aktiv. Eine Förderung naturwissenschaftlicher Kompetenzen und Interessen wird mit der Weiterentwicklung anderer Fähigkeiten und des allgemeinen Selbstkonzepts der Kinder verbunden. Diese...

In two experiments, the role of spatial ability in learning from an instructional animation versus a series of static pictures was studied. In both experiments, a statistical interaction of spatial ability and type of visualization was obtained: Low-spatial ability students showed poor learning outcome when learning from pictures while high-spatial...

In a 2×2 design, we examined the role of visual cognitive style in two multimedia-based learning environments (text plus static pictures/animations). A statistically significant interaction was obtained for deeper comprehension: Highly developed visualizers (HDV) who learned with static pictures performed better than HDV who learned with animations...

This meta-analytical review focuses on the role of spatial ability when learning with pictorial visualizations. By means of selective theoretical review and meta-analysis (the latter regarding 27 different experiments from 19 studies), several sub-factors of spatial ability are considered as well as dynamic and non-dynamic, interactive and non-inte...

Die Frage nach Lernvorteilen von dynamischen Visualisierungen gegenüber Standbildern ist nach wie vor umstritten. Während auf der einen Seite computerbasierte Animationen eine realistischere Abbildung komplexer Prozesse und Prozeduren versprechen, die Vorlage für ein exaktes mentales Modell liefern können, verweisen auf der anderen Seite Forschungs...

A meta-analysis of 26 primary studies, yielding 76 pair-wise comparisons of dynamic and static visualizations, reveals a medium-sized overall advantage of instructional animations over static pictures. The mean weighted effect size on learning outcome is d=0.37 (95% CI 0.25–0.49). Moderator analyses indicate even more substantial effect sizes when...

Abstract 24 students learned about a chemical process either from animation or static pictures taken from the animation at four crucial points. An aptitude-treatment interaction was obtained in which spatial ability plays a compensating role: Low-spatial ability students showed poor learning outcomes when learning from pictures while high-spatial s...