Educational Psychology Review最新文献

We use three studies to develop and validate the new concept of playful study design – the cognitive-behavioral orientation towards study tasks with the aim to make these tasks more fun and/or more challenging. Based on play and proactive motivation theories, we propose that playful study design can be assessed by items indicating two dimensions: designing fun and designing competition. Results of exploratory (N = 378 students) and confirmatory (N = 375 students) factor analyses support the two-factor structure of the playful study design instrument in a first study. In addition, we use the data of the whole sample of Study 1 to test the convergent and incremental validity of the construct. Results indicate that playful study design predicts students’ social integration, study engagement, and well-being over and above psychological capital and core self-evaluations. In Study 2 (N = 591 students), we used playful study design to predict course grades. Results show that particularly designing competition was beneficial for study performance. In Study 3 (N = 28 students), we conducted a quasi-experimental evaluation of a training intervention to demonstrate that students who learned to playfully redesign their study tasks increased their use of fun and competition when studying. As a result, they showed greater active learning, study task proactivity, and absorption over time compared to the control group. We discuss how the construct of playful study design adds to the educational psychology literature and has implications for educational practice in university settings.

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds significant potential for enhancing student learning. This reflection critically examines the promises and limitations of AI for cognitive learning processes and outcomes, drawing on empirical evidence and theoretical insights from research on AI-enhanced education and digital learning technologies. We critically discuss current publication trends in research on AI-enhanced learning and rather than assuming inherent benefits, we emphasize the role of instructional implementation and the need for systematic investigations that build on insights from existing research on the role of technology in instructional effectiveness. Building on this foundation, we introduce the ISAR model, which differentiates four types of AI effects on learning compared to learning conditions without AI, namely inversion, substitution, augmentation, and redefinition. Specifically, AI can substitute existing instructional approaches while maintaining equivalent instructional functionality, augment instruction by providing additional cognitive learning support, or redefine tasks to foster deep learning processes. However, the implementation of AI must avoid potential inversion effects, such as over-reliance leading to reduced cognitive engagement. Additionally, successful AI integration depends on moderating factors, including students’ AI literacy and educators’ technological and pedagogical skills. Our discussion underscores the need for a systematic and evidence-based approach to AI in education, advocating for rigorous research and informed adoption to maximize its potential while mitigating possible risks.

Misinformation can have severe negative effects on people’s decisions, behaviors, and on society at large. This creates a need to develop and evaluate educational interventions that prepare people to recognize and respond to misinformation. We systematically review 107 articles describing educational interventions across various lines of research. In characterizing existing educational interventions, this review combines a theory-driven approach with a data-driven approach. The theory-driven approach uncovered that educational interventions differ in terms of how they define misinformation and regarding which misinformation characteristics they target. The data-driven approach uncovered that educational interventions have been addressed by research on the misinformation effect, lie detection, information literacy, and fraud trainings, with each line of research yielding different types of interventions. Furthermore, this article reviews evidence about the interventions’ effectiveness. Besides identifying several promising types of interventions, comparisons across different lines of research yield open questions that future research should address to identify ways to increase people's resilience towards misinformation.

Learners’ attempts to regulate their own motivation for studying in the face of tedious or difficult tasks is an important aspect of self-regulated learning. Therefore, motivation regulation has received increasing attention over the past few years, resulting in numerous publications using different definitions of the construct, samples, operationalizations, and research designs. The aim of this systematic review is to present an interactive evidence and gap map synthesizing current research with respect to what we know about motivation regulation, what the sources (e.g., samples, research methods, operationalizations) of this knowledge are, and which aspects proposed by theoretical models of motivation regulation remain understudied. Based on a systematic literature search, N = 289 studies were included. Approximately three quarters of the studies examined motivation regulation of university students, used cross-sectional study designs, and self-report questionnaires. Achievement, effort-related variables, (meta-)cognitive learning strategies, and goal orientations were the most frequently reported correlates of motivation regulation. Motivation regulation was examined mainly for learning in general, but also in more specific contexts, such as digital or foreign language learning. The maps’ gaps reveal that we still know little about motivation regulation in pre- and primary school children and its development across school years. Furthermore, despite the conceptualization of self-regulation as a context dependent construct, contextual characteristics have received little attention. These and other gaps are discussed, including suggestions for advancing theoretical models of motivation regulation. The structured maps enable quick overviews of evidence (gaps), aiding a rapid, strategic development of future research questions and potential meta-analyses.

Peer-feedback can be an effective method to support learning. However, students often require instructional support to provide and process peer-feedback effectively. Previous research used various types of instructional support to improve the quality of peer-feedback processes and outcomes. Yet, a comprehensive overview over their effects is missing. Therefore, this meta-analysis (based on N = 32 studies with N = 3806 learners) investigates the effects of different kinds of instructional support (feedback provision vs. feedback reception; content-specific vs. generic) on peer-feedback processes (formulating high-quality feedback messages, or effectively reflecting on the feedback received) and outcomes (subject-matter-related knowledge). Overall, peer-feedback with vs. without instructional support had a substantial positive effect (g = 0.47). Furthermore, we found a positive effect of feedback provision support on the quality of feedback provision (g = 0.72) and the quality of feedback reception (g = 0.69) but not on subject-matter-related knowledge. For feedback reception support, we found no effects on peer-feedback processes and outcomes at all. During feedback provision, content-specific support positively influenced the quality of feedback provision (g = 0.75) but not subject-matter-related knowledge, while generic support exerts a positive impact on the quality of feedback provision (g = 0.70) and subject-matter-related knowledge (g = 0.55). During feedback reception, we again found no significant effects of content-related support and generic support at all. The lack of effects for feedback reception support may be related to the limited number of studies on feedback reception in general. Finally, concrete implications and suggestions for future research are provided.

Transversal skills describe a broad spectrum of skills that are considered to be essential for thriving in today’s society and tackling the challenges of the twenty-first century. Therefore, a high demand is placed on educators to teach these skills to their students. Unfortunately, the conceptualization of transversal skills remains vague with different frameworks reporting on various transversal skills, which complicates a translation of these skills into educational practice and research, thereby making them a “blind spot” in psychological research and educational practice. This paper brings the blind spot on transversal skills to a direct focus. First, we propose a conceptualization of transversal skills through a review and integration of existing frameworks. We organize transversal skills into four core concepts: cognitive skills (e.g., creativity and problem-solving), citizenship (e.g., democratic participation and respect), well-being (e.g., mental and physical health), and social-emotional skills (e.g., collaboration and communication). Second, we highlight possible ways to implement these core concepts into educational practice by providing specific examples on how to integrate specific skills into five subjects: language, mathematics, science, social studies, and arts and music. Third, a research agenda is proposed that considers the structure and underlying processes of transversal skills, their development and interventions at different stages, their predictive validity for success, and cultural differences and diversity.

The classroom represents a complex socio-cultural environment where emotions emerge as a result of instruction, learning, and interpersonal transactions. Teachers’ ability to recognize, regulate, and respond to emotions in the classroom has powerful consequences for students’ behavior, learning, and the teacher’s own well-being. In order to be effective in instruction and classroom management and to prevent emotional burnout, teachers have to be emotionally competent. Furthermore, fostering teachers’ emotional competence helps with teacher retention. Several studies documented the positive effects of emotional training of aspiring and practicing teachers. However, there is a need for a better understanding of specific emotional skills pertinent to the teaching profession. We propose eight competencies essential for teachers to be effective in using emotions for instructional and relational purposes and managing their own and students’ emotions. These competencies include (1) understanding teachers’ own emotions; (2) effective emotion regulation; (3) effective emotional communication; (4) maintaining teachers’ emotional well-being; (5) understanding and responding to students’ emotions; (6) utilizing emotions to promote learning; (7) utilizing emotions to foster positive relationships and emotional climate in the classroom; and (8) promoting students’ social-emotional learning. We further identified discrete emotional skills within each competence and their implication for instruction, classroom management, social-emotional learning in the classroom, and teachers’ well-being. The proposed model of teacher emotional competence can be used as a springboard to develop emotional training programs and guide assessment practices aimed at the evaluation of teachers’ emotional skills.

Conscientiousness has consistent and robust associations with a large set of key student outcomes. Thus, to understand the extent to which conscientiousness could be leveraged to support students’ learning, achievement, and well-being, it is important to ascertain whether conscientiousness could be strengthened by means of interventions. To narrow this important knowledge gap, this research synthesizes the findings of recent studies on the efficacy of interventions designed to increase conscientiousness. To this end, we conducted a systematic review of several online databases to identify relevant articles published after the last major review of personality change interventions (in 2017). The search yielded 11 articles that met our inclusion criteria. These studies used one of three types of interventions: digital coaching, in-person coaching, and behavior activation. Nine of the interventions we reviewed significantly increased conscientiousness at either the trait, facet, or state level. Our review identified several gaps in conscientiousness intervention literature, such as the lack of knowledge about mediating and moderating factors of intervention effects and the relative paucity of studies assessing the maintenance of intervention effects. The article discusses the significance of these findings and, building upon them, delineates important directions for future research and intervention.

A common theme across psychological research on belonging in school has been a focus on the social—on the quality of students’ connections to others in the school environment. In this review, I argue that when a student indicates that they do or do not “feel like I belong at my school,” social connections are necessary but not sufficient to fully explain that experience. Extending Schmader and Sedikides’ State Authenticity as Fit to Environment model, I instead propose that this experience hinges on four factors: the degrees to which (a) teachers and other students accept, value, and include a student socially (social fit), (b) an academic setting’s structures and norms support and afford their personal goals and values (goal fit), (c) the school environment naturally activates or supports their connections to their most valued identities (self-concept fit), and (d) the school environment provides sufficient financial, nutritional, health, and safety resources to meet their needs in these domains (resource fit). In reviewing how students, especially those from from historically under-researched backgrounds, define belonging, I demonstrate both the divergence of their definitions from the traditional psychological focus on social connections alone, and the convergence of their definitions with these four forms of person–environment fit. I therefore argue that shifting to a model of students’ experiences of belonging that centers on self-concept, goal, resource and social fit would provide an especially fruitful future for research on this subject.

Edelsbrunner et al. Educational Psychology Review, 37, 1–43, 2025 recently published a systematic review and meta-analysis of Cronbach's alphas in domain-specific knowledge tests. While appreciating their analysis and agreeing with most findings, we disagree with three messages regarding the use of alpha in knowledge tests: (1) alpha measures the strength of interrelations among items, (2) a low alpha indicates validity, and (3) thresholds for alpha be abandoned. We discuss these messages in a constructive manner and present a way to counteract the inflation of seemingly high alphas in educational psychology.