Minority student school dropout represents a challenging issue for educational systems in many countries. Notwithstanding minority families' overall high academic aspirations, there is a stable achievement gap between majority and minority students. Minority students who are emotionally engaged with their school tend to be psychologically and socioculturally better adapted to their country of residence and, as a result, report higher academic success. Therefore, emotional school engagement represents a relevant factor for integration into the host society. The goal of this paper is to investigate the interrelation between ethnic and national identity, perceived discrimination, and perceived support from parents, peers, and teachers with emotional school engagement. Results indicate that cultural capital within the family, cultural self-identification, and perceived support from peers and teachers play an important role for students’ emotional school engagement.

The switch to emergency remote teaching (ERT) due to the first COVID-19 lockdown demanded a lot from university lecturers yet did not pose the same challenge to all of them. This study sought to explain differences among lecturers (n = 796) from universities in France, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK in their use of educational technology for teaching, institutional support, and personal factors. Guided by the Social Cognitive Theory (SCT), lecturers’ behavior (educational technology use), environment (institutional support), and personal factors (ERT self-efficacy, continuance intentions, and demographics) were examined. Latent class analysis was employed to identify different types of lecturers in view of educational technology use, while multinomial regression and Wald chi-square test were used to distinguish classes. The largest latent class were Presenters (45.6%), who focused on content delivery, followed by Strivers (22.1%), who strived for social interaction, Routineers (19.6%), who were ready for online teaching, and Evaders (12.7%), who evaded using technology for educational purposes. Both personal factors and perceived institutional support explained class membership significantly. Accordingly, Evaders were older, less experienced, and rarely perceived institutional support as useful. Routineers, the Evaders’ counterparts, felt most self-efficient in ERT and held the highest continuance intentions for educational technology use. This research suggests that universities engage lecturers in evidence-based professional development that seeks shared visions of digital transformation, networks and communities, and design-based research.

In the course of their acculturation process, minority students need to negotiate the adaption to the host society’s culture and the maintenance of the culture of their country of origin. This identity construction is complex and may encompass contradicting and competing goals. The adjustment to school is seen as a relevant acculturation marker. An increasingly prominent multidimensional construct is students’ school engagement because it can provide an insight into the way students feel and interact with the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral domains of school. Successful adjustment to school culture, and acculturation in general, can be closely related to school engagement. There is yet no common knowledge about the role bicultural national and/or ethnic identity plays for the three dimensions of school engagement. The present study focusses on minority students in Germany who report a strong bicultural identity (in comparison with single stronger ethnic or national identities, as well as weaker bicultural identification) to explain students’ emotional, cognitive, and behavioral school engagement when controlling for gender, SES, and cultural capital. Data is derived from paper–pencil questionnaires administered in secondary schools in Germany. Regression analyses show that students with a stronger bicultural identity have a significantly higher emotional, cognitive, and behavioral school engagement than their peers with a weaker bicultural identity, when controlling for gender, SES, and cultural capital. The results hint at the relevance of fostering students’ ethnic, but also their national, cultural identity to support their school engagement. Implications for teacher education are discussed.

Triggered by the spread of the Coronavirus and the lockdown of universities in spring 2020, universities were required to provide infrastructure for digital teaching within a very short time. Further, all university members needed to develop knowledge and skills for teaching online. This paper presents data from the cross-cultural CRTS-Study (Coronavirus-Related Teaching Situation Study), which compares the experiences, attitudes and needs of university teachers in Germany and Argentina during the first lockdown in the context of the Coronavirus pandemic. The study has been carried out in spring 2020 as a cross-sectional online survey study with university teachers in Germany and Argentina (N = 728). The overall picture reveals a mostly successful implementation of online teaching for university teachers in both countries, with Argentinian university teachers reporting a slightly more positive perspective and slightly higher self-efficacy beliefs in online teaching when compared with the German colleagues. The results of regression analysis hint at the relevance of prior personal experience and institutional support for self-efficacy beliefs in online teaching for both samples. In conclusion, individual experience and training as well as supportive institutional conditions seem to be relevant for the development of digital teaching at universities in both countries.

The chapter focuses on the use of student feedback on teaching during practical phases in teacher education. After a brief introduction into the general relevance and validity of students’ perceptions on teaching, and on the use of student feedback for teaching development, core findings from two comparable quasi-experimental studies from Germany and Switzerland are presented in detail. The studies focus on the change of attitudes towards student feedback and towards reflection on teaching. The chapter concludes with a discussion of challenges and opportunities for the use of student feedback as an instrument for reflection on teaching and professional development for pre-service teachers.

Die Digitalisierung von Studium und Lehre stellt einen komplexen Entwicklungsprozess dar, der für alle beteiligten Akteurinnen und Akteure Herausforderungen, wie beispielsweise die Auseinandersetzung mit den Einsatzmöglichkeiten digitaler Medien und die Entwicklung digitaler Kompetenzen, mit sich bringt (Getto und Schulenburg 2018; Kerres 2016). Der Beginn der Corona-Pandemie und die damit verbundene erstmalige Schliessung der Universitäten im Frühjahr 2020 erforderte innerhalb kürzester Zeit die Umstellung der konventionellen universitären Lehre in Präsenzform auf online-gestützte Lehrformate. Wie diese Umstellung von Hochschulangehörigen in Deutschland erlebt wurde, in welchem Ausmass digitale Tools in der eigenen Lehre im Sommersemester 2020 eingesetzt wurden und welche personenbezogenen Merkmale hierfür relevant erscheinen, ist Gegenstand des vorliegenden Beitrags. Die deskriptive Auswertung der bundesweiten Befragung von Dozierenden deutscher Hochschulen verdeutlicht ambivalente Erfahrungen mit der Umstellung auf Online-Lehre. Dennoch wird insgesamt die Bewältigung der pädagogisch-didaktischen Herausforderungen durch die zeitweilige Schliessung der Universitäten aus Sicht der Dozierenden als erfolgreich eingeschätzt. Für das Ausmass der Nutzung digitaler Tools während des Lockdowns zeigen sich in den Korrelationsanalysen signifikante Zusammenhänge mit den bisherigen Vorerfahrungen, der selbsteingeschätzten Fähigkeit, digital zu lehren, sowie Unterschiede zwischen männlichen und weiblichen Befragten.