Abstract.
The shift to a knowledge society has transformed the way we live and work, which is especially challenging to adults with low education levels. Adult education could be the answer, but low-educated adults participate least in adult education. The present study uses data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies to investigate participation needs and barriers of low-, medium- and high-educated adults across 15 European countries (N = 20,593). Descriptives show that low-educated adults report the lowest need for training to exercise their job and indicate to be the least prevented from taking more training because of experienced barriers. We then analysed which barriers non-participating and participating adults were referring to. While medium- and high-educated non-participants indicate being prevented because of work and family responsibilities, low-educated non-participants chose family responsibilities but mainly and remarkably the option ‘other’ as their most important barrier. Contrary to medium- and high-educated adults, low-educated adults’ most important barrier could not be defined. A possible explanation is that they experience more dispositional barriers (such as bad memories of education or low self-esteem), which were not included in the list. Our results point to the importance of targeting low-educated adults in participation research.

Keywords.
Barriers, PIAAC, adult education, low-educated adults, Europe

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Abstract.
Even though studies have shown that the impact of professional development on inquiry-based learning (IBL) tends to remain limited when it fails to consider teachers' beliefs, there is little known about how these beliefs influence teachers' adoption of IBL. In answer to this issue, the present study offers a framework that explains teachers' use of IBL through three constitutive dimensions of beliefs systems, covering the constructs of education, the self, and the context. This framework is empirically investigated through a survey study with 536 secondary school history teachers. The resulting data are used to estimate a structural equation model (SEM), which indicates that the framework is able to explain a relatively large portion (38%) of the variance in teachers' decision to implement IBL. Based on the findings, the implications for professional development and research on teachers' use of IBL in general, and within history education in particular, are discussed.

Keywords.
inquiry-based learning, history education, teacher education, educational beliefs

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Abstract.
The implementation of blended learning in higher education is increasing, often with the aim to offer flexibility in terms of time and place to a diverse student population. However, specific attention for the diversity of this group, and how to cater individual needs, is still scarce. Therefore, this study explores instructors' strategies for and beliefs about differentiated instruction in blended learning, together with how the differences between instructors can be explained. A total of 20 instructors working in two adult education centers participated in semi-structured interviews focusing on their (a) use of strategies for differentiated instruction, and (b) beliefs about designing blended learning to address student diversity. The findings reveal that the most commonly used differentiated instruction strategy in a blended learning context was providing students with additional support throughout product development. In addition, three instructor profiles about designing blended learning to address student diversity emerged from the data: (1) disregard: instructors considered no additional support in the blended learning arrangements to match students' needs, (2) adaptation: instructors believed that increased support in the existing blended learning arrangements was sufficient to match students' needs, and (3) transformation: instructors thought that blended learning arrangements should be designed in a completely different way, and be tailored to the characteristics of the students. The results show that half of the instructors considered a transformation of their blended learning arrangements in response to student diversity. Furthermore, instructors' beliefs appear to be strongly connected to the organization and trajectory in which they work. A major implication of these findings is that professional support focusing on instructors' beliefs is of crucial importance to unlock blended learning's full potential. As such, it is important for organizations to develop a clear stance on this issue, which pays explicit attention to responding to learners' needs in blended learning contexts.

Keywords.
blended learning, differentiated instruction, teacher education, educational beliefs

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Abstract.
Professional development on inquiry-based learning (IBL) generally draws heavily on the principle of providing instruction in line with what teachers are expected to do in their classroom. So far, however, relatively little is known about how this impacts teachers' educational beliefs, even though these beliefs ultimately determine their classroom behavior. The present study therefore investigates how immersion in inquiry-based learning affects student teachers' beliefs about knowledge goals, in addition to their self-efficacy for inquiry. In total, 302 student history teachers participated in a four-hour long inquiry activity designed within the WISE learning environment, and completed a pre- and posttest right before and after the intervention. Multilevel analyses suggest that the intervention had a significant positive effect on the value that student teachers attributed to procedural knowledge goals, or learning how historical knowledge is constructed, and on student teachers' self-efficacy for conducting inquiries. Despite these general positive results, however, the results also show that the impact of the intervention differed significantly across students. In particular, it appears that immersion in IBL had little effect on a subgroup of 25 student-teachers, who held largely content-oriented beliefs. Based on these findings, the present study discusses a number of implications for professional development on IBL.

Keywords.
inquiry-based learning, educational technology, history education, teacher education, educational beliefs

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Abstract.
Criticizing the common approach of supporting peer assessment through providing assessors with an explication of assessment criteria, recent insights on peer assessment call for support focusing on assessees, who often assume a passive role of receivers of feedback. Feedback requests, which require assessees to formulate their specific needs for feedback, have therefore been put forward as an alternative to supporting peer assessment, even though there is little known about their exact impact on feedback. Operationalizing effective feedback as feedback that (1) elaborates on the evaluation and (2) to which the receiver is agreeable, the present study examines how these two variables are affected by feedback requests, compared to an explanation of assessment criteria in the form of a content checklist. Situated against the backdrop of a writing task for 125 first-year students in an educational studies program at university, the study uses a 2 x 2 factorial design that resulted in four conditions: a control, feedback request, content checklist, and combination condition. The results underline the importance of taking message length into account when studying the effects of support for peer assessment. Although feedback requests did not have an impact on the raw number of elaborations, the proportio n of informative elaborations within feedback messages was significantly higher in conditions that used a feedback request. In other words, it appears that the feedback request stimulated students to write more focused messages. In comparison with feedback content, the use of a feedback request did, however, not have a significant effect on agreement with feedback

Keywords.
peer assessment, feedback request, feedback content, agreement with feedback

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Abstract.
Adopting a differentiated and domain-specific view of educational technology, the present study focusses on the case of school history. It argues that, in this particular context, one of technology's main assets is its ability to support inquiry-based learning activities, during which students interpret the past through historical reasoning. As little is known about how history teachers use technology in the classroom, an exploratory study was carried out with 22 teachers in fourth grade of secondary education in Flanders (Belgium). Semi-structured interviews were used to investigate beliefs about technology, ways in which technology was implemented, and factors influencing the adoption process. The results suggest that most teachers held positive beliefs about technology, and that use of technology was driven by several rationales. Although a significant group of teachers was thoughtful of how their own use of technology could support students' learning, student use remained limited to instances where technology served as a resource for the task, rather than a tool for supporting cognitive or social activity. It appears that teachers were not yet aware of technology's ability to scaffold inquiry activities. Furthermore, limitations in school infrastructure often prevented them from experimenting with more pervasive student uses of technology.

Keywords.
history education, historical reasoning, technology-enhanced learning, teacher beliefs

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Abstract.
The design of blended learning environments brings with it four key challenges: (1) incorporating flexibility, (2) stimulating interaction, (3) facilitating students’ learning processes, and (4) fostering an affective learning climate. Seeing that attempts to resolve these challenges are fragmented across the literature, a systematic review was performed. Starting from 640 sources, 20 studies on the design of blended learning environments were selected through a staged procedure based on the guidelines of the PRISMA statement, using predefined selection criteria. For each study, the instructional activities for dealing with these four challenges were analyzed by two coders. The results show that few studies offer learners control over the realization of the blend. Social interaction is generally stimulated through introductory face-to-face meetings, while personalization and monitoring of students’ learning progress is commonly organized through online instructional activities. Finally, little attention is paid to instructional activities that foster an affective learning climate.

Keywords.
Instructional activities; blended learning; educational technology; course design

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Abstract.
The present study explores secondary school history teachers's knowledge of inquiry methods. In order to do so, a process model, outlining 5 core cognitive processes of inquiry in the history class room, was developed based on a review of the literature. This process model was then used to analyze think-aloud protocols of 20 teachers' reasoning during an inquiry task. It was found that less than half of the teachers used all cognitive processes during the inquiry. Based on the results, a distinction can be made between an integral, fragmentary and cursory approach to inquiry. Further analysis suggest that there exists no clear pattern in the relation between teachers' beliefs about the subject of history and their approach to inquiry. The implications for teacher training are discussed, and outline how the process model could serve as an instructional tool that can contribute to a comprehensive training program for history teachers.

Keywords.
history education, inquir-based learning, teacher knowledge

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Abstract.
The present study investigates a training program aimed at preparing pre-service history teachers for organizing inquiry-based learning (IBL) in class. This program consisted of a workshop and an assignment during the teaching internship period. Pre- and posttests indicate that the workshop had a significant effect on self-efficacy and attitude toward IBL, but also that most student teachers' attitudes had again changed after the assignment. Related to this, student teachers' lesson plans revealed three different templates, representing distinct interpretations of ’inquiry’. An analysis of reflection papers and interviews describes how the context of the teaching internship further shaped student teachers' thinking.

Keywords.
history education, inquiry-based learning, student teachers, teacher learning

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Abstract.
The present study provides a comprehensive picture of history teachers' conceptions of inquiry-based-learning (IBL), based on interviews with 22 secondary school teachers. The results indicate that, although most teachers' beliefs about the nature of history were conducive to teaching historical reasoning, their conceptions of IBL often remained limited to critically evaluating information, instead of using the available information to conduct inquiries into the past. Furthermore, teachers' conceptions of IBL appeared to be strongly connected to the context in which they worked. Based on these findings, several implications for supporting history teachers' adoption of IBL are discussed.

Keywords.
history education, historical reasoning, inquiry-based learning, teacher beliefs

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Abstract.
Developing authentic learning environments in higher education calls for pedagogical approaches to foster online collaborative learning. The main aim of this study was to investigate the effect of a collaboration script for a wiki task. A collaboration script is a set of instructions to improve collaboration between learning partners. Participants were first-year university students in Educational Sciences (N=186) collaborating in groups of five during a three-week period to create a wiki on peer assessment in education. Two conditions were contrasted: a scripted and a non-scripted condition. The effect of scripting was measured in four ways (questionnaires, log-file analyses, group product scores, and individual pre- post- test scores). Results show significant positive effects of scripting with respect to the collaborative group processes and students' feelings of shared responsibility. No significant effects of scripting were found with respect to the developed wiki products. As for students' individual learning outcomes, results showed a significant increase from pre- to post-test for all students. Although the increase was higher in the scripted condition, the difference between the conditions was not statistically significant.

Keywords.
Wiki, script, collaboration, collaborative learning

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Abstract.
Background: In problem-based learning, a tutor, the quality of the problems and group functioning play a central role in stimulating student learning. This study is conducted in a hybrid medical curriculum where problem-based learning is one of the pedagogical approaches. The aim of this study was to examine which tutor tasks are the most important during the tutorial sessions and thus should be promoted in hybrid (and in maybe all) problem-based learning curricula in higher education. Methods: A student (N = 333) questionnaire was used to obtain data about the problem-based learning process, combined with the achievement score of the students on a multiple-choice exam. Structural equation modeling was used to test the fit of different models (two existing models and a new simplified model) representing the factors of interest and their relationships, in order to determine which tutor characteristics are the most important in the present study. Results: A new simplified model is presented, which demonstrates that stimulation of active and self-directed learning by tutors enhances the perceived case quality and the perceived group functioning. There was no significant effect between the stimulation of collaborative learning and perceived group functioning. In addition, group functioning was not a significant predictor for achievement. Conclusions: We found that stimulating active and self-directed learning are perceived as tutors' most important tasks with regard to perceived case quality and group functioning. It is necessary to train and teach tutors how they can stimulate active and self-directed learning by students.

Keywords.
Problem-based learning, Tutor roles

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