Current Projects

The research project is affiliated to the project Intervention in Mathematics for Professional Support of Low-Performing Students (IMPULSE). IMPULSE investigates the potential of different approaches to support low-performing pupils at the sensitive point of transition to secondary school in mathematics. In PULS:E, the specific topic of teachers' self-efficacy in dealing with low-performing pupils and the teaching perceptions of these pupils are examined. Prominent heterogeneity categories such as socio-economic background, migration and gender are included in the analysis. Furthermore, the cooperation project extends the German research project to Austria. The aim of the project is to generate differentiated results on the determinants of teaching in relation to low-performing pupils, also in the context of teacher professionalisation.

The cooperation will use (a) data from the German project on student teachers' self-efficacy and (b) data from an Austrian survey on student teachers' self-efficacy. In addition, secondary analyses will be conducted using data from the Institute of the Federation for Quality Assurance in the Austrian School System (IQS) on student teachers' perceptions of teaching. The Austrian study will be conducted at three locations in Austria and will include approximately 200 student teachers. Online questionnaires will be used for the survey, which will be analysed in a second step using quantitative methods. The research design will offer the possibility to make comparisons between Germany and Austria. Finally, the impact of an intervention on the self-efficacy of the student teachers carrying out the intervention will be examined (using the German data).