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Studies have provided empirical evidence, that teachers' judgments of students' academic performance are biased by social stereotypes. Thus, in the present study it was tested whether the impact of stereotypes about immigrant students, students with a low socioeconomic status and male students on preservice teachers' evaluations can be reduced by a counterstereotypic training. For this purpose, one hundred and forty-seven preservice teachers first read a short text in which a fifth grader male student was described who could respectively be allocated to one of these three stereotypical categories. Half of the participants then completed the training. After that, all subjects were asked to evaluate an essay of the fictive target and to give a prognosis about his level of graduation. The results showed that the training led to a reduction of the stereotype-based judgment bias only with regard to the gender stereotype. Accordingly, in the training condition the male target's essay was marked better and the prognosis of his level of graduation was higher than in the no-training condition. No training effects were found for the other two stereotypes. The implications of the study are discussed with regard to teacher education and vocational trainings.

It was investigated whether teachers' feedback skills to support students' self-regulated learning (SRL) can be improved by short-term video-based interventions and/or direct instructions that were adapted to a SRL framework. Forty pre-service and 40 in-service teachers were assigned to a video + instruction or an instruction-only condition. Highest improvements were expected for the combination of the two interventions. However, results indicated that functional feedback to support SRL benefited most from instruction-only, while the reduction of dysfunctional feedback was highest in the video + instruction condition. The findings have practical implications for the design of interventions to improve teachers' feedback skills.

In the present study, the assumption was tested that expectancy-incongruent feedback in conjunction with explicit self-affirmation directs attention away from the task and to the self. As a result, performance should decrease in resource-sensitive text/picture comprehension tasks as compared to resource-insensitive tasks. Three hundred and thirty-seven fifth graders first completed either easy or difficult text/picture comprehension tasks and then rated their learning outcome. After that, they received bogus feedback that had been congruent or incongruent with their expectations. In addition, half of the participants were given the opportunity for self-affirmation before they completed additional easy or difficult text/picture tasks. As predicted, feedback better than expected or worse than expected impaired performance in the resource-sensitive tasks but only in the self-affirmation condition. The results are discussed with regard to central assumptions of the feedback intervention theory (Kluger and DeNisi, "Psychological Bulletin," 119: 254-284, 1996) and practical implications for the provision of feedback.

The ability to flexibly allocate attention to goal-relevant information is pivotal for the completion of high-level cognitive processes. For instance, in comprehending illustrated texts, the reader permanently has to switch the attentional focus between the text and the corresponding picture in order to extract relevant information from both sources. Thus, the hypothesis was tested that individuals with a lower switching capacity exhibit a decreased performance in tasks that require the flexible switch of attention between two external representations. Participants read an illustrated text and answered questions that either required the extraction of information from the text alone or from the text and the corresponding illustration. In addition, a switching task was accomplished. Results indicate that a lower switching capacity resulted in a poorer performance in those tasks that required the extraction of relevant information from two sources.

The term "modality effect" in multimedia learning means that students learn better from pictures combined with spoken rather than written text. The most prominent explanations refer to the split attention between visual text reading and picture observation which could affect transfer of information into working memory, maintenance of information in working memory or the effective size of working memory. The assumption of a continuous need for split attention is questionable, however. Learners can keep pictorial information in working memory, when they have seen the picture before, especially if they have higher prior knowledge. Instead of suffering from a permanent split attention, learners frequently show tendencies to simply ignore pictures. This suggests guiding learners towards picture analysis by picture-related text paragraphs. We assume that these paragraphs are associated with stronger modality effects than content-related paragraphs, especially if the pictures are new to learners. These assumptions were tested in an experiment with 120 students learning about volcanism from illustrated text consisting of segments each including a content-related paragraph followed by a picture-related paragraph describing the accompanying visualization. Content-related and picture-related paragraphs were presented as visual or auditory texts leading to 2x2 conditions of text presentation. Picture novelty was manipulated by presenting a picture throughout the whole segment or only when the picture-related paragraph was read. As expected, picture-related paragraphs were associated with stronger modality effects than content-related paragraphs if picture novelty is high. The distinction between different kinds of paragraphs seems to be important for the prediction of modality effects.

This study tested the assumption that the effectiveness of feedback with regard to performance, motivation, and affect is moderated by the learners' self-concept. A total of 72 sixth-graders completed a web-based interactive learning program. Half of the sample received feedback and the other half received no feedback. Differential feedback effects were detected. For students with a positive academic self-concept, feedback led to a decline in performance and in mood but an increase in effort. With regard to participants with a negative self-concept, feedback worked against the decrease in mood but did not increase performance and motivation. These findings support the claim that feedback effects should be assessed with regard to (1) multiple dimensions and (2) possible moderating variables.

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the supportive effects of conceptual change texts documented in science education (1) can also be demonstrated in the domain of social cognition and (2) are moderated by the structure of the text and the learner's central executive capacity. In two experiments, participants were presented with a series of short texts, each describing a target person in a stereotypical manner. The description was consistent with the stereotype in one half of the text, and the initially activated stereotype was refuted by stereotype-incongruent target information in the other half. In some of the inconsistent texts, the inconsistency was explained by additional information, or the readers were not given support for resolving the inconsistency. The results indicated an interaction of type of text and central executive capacity. Higher central executive capacity fostered conceptual change but only when the texts explained the inconsistency.

During reading, the model of the situation described by the text is continuously accommodated to new text input. The hypothesis was tested that readers are particularly sensitive to diagnostic text information that can be used to constrain their existing situation model. In 3 experiments, adult participants read narratives about social situations that were ambiguous in terms of whether they involved 2 or 3 social cliques. Diagnostic text information enabling the reader to constrain the situation model to 1 of the 2 potential versions required longer reading times than non-diagnostic information, and fundamentally affected the structure of the situation model. Recognizing the diagnostic value of critical text information did not require additional working memory resources, but updating the situation model according to the diagnostic information did. This evidence may suggest that some of the situation model updating is occurring offline. The results are discussed with regard to working memory resources required in updating situation models. (Contains 4 tables, 2 figures, and 1 footnote.)