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Dialogic Teaching (DT) is effective in fostering student learning; yet, it is hard to implement. Little research focused on secondary teachers' learning of DT and on the link between teachers' understanding and practices, although these two are usually strongly intertwined. Using a wide range of evidence, this case-study systematically investigated and compared two secondary teachers' understanding and practice of DT during their participation in a continuing professional development programme (CPDP). The CPDP appeared effective to some extent. The History teacher's understanding of DT, i.e., being a co-learner, appeared highly effective in implementing DT whereas the Mathematics teacher's understanding of DT, i.e., creating a democratic learning environment, seemed only effective to some extent. Focusing on both teachers' understanding and practice when developing DT seemed fruitful in explaining differences in practice. Future research could further explore to what extent understanding DT as being a co-learner facilitates professional development. ; This work was supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.

Teacher scaffolding, in which teachers support students adaptively or contingently, is assumed to be effective. Yet, hardly any evidence from classroom studies exists. With the current experimental classroom study we investigated whether scaffolding affects students' achievement, task effort, and appreciation of teacher support, when students work in small groups. We investigated both the effects of support quality (i.e., contingency) and the duration of the independent working time of the groups. Thirty social studies teachers of pre-vocational education and 768 students (age 12–15) participated. All teachers taught a five-lesson project on the European Union and the teachers in the scaffolding condition additionally took part in a scaffolding intervention. Low contingent support was more effective in promoting students' achievement and task effort than high contingent support in situations where independent working time was low (i.e. help was frequent). In situations where independent working time was high (i.e., help was less frequent), high contingent support was more effective than low contingent support in fostering students' achievement (when correcting for students' task effort). In addition, higher levels of contingent support resulted in a higher appreciation of support. Scaffolding, thus, is not unequivocally effective; its effectiveness depends, among other things, on the independent working time of the groups and students' task effort. The present study is one of the first experimental study on scaffolding in an authentic classroom context, including factors that appear to matter in such an authentic context.

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) fulfill different needs for different citizens. In national elections, the majority of users can be characterized as politically sophisticated citizens who use VAAs for entertainment purposes and confirmation of their party preference, but a significant minority uses VAAs to learn about politics and make an informed vote choice. VAAs might, however, play a different role in second-order elections, since in these elections campaign dynamics and information supply are very different. In the current research, we applied latent class analysis on user data from a widely used Dutch VAA (Kieskompas) for a supranational and several subnational elections in the Netherlands, to test if an extant typology of VAA users for national elections could be replicated. We find that the typology can be replicated for most of these elections, but also that the relative size of the groups of users differs across elections; in all second-order elections except for the provincial elections, more doubters and seekers are found relative to national elections. This suggests that VAAs are likely to have stronger mobilizing potential in these second-order elections.

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) provide voting recommendations to millions of people. As these voting recommendations are based on users' answers to attitude questions, the framing of these questions can have far-reaching consequences. The current study reports on a field experiment in which the framing of the header above VAA statements (N = 17) was manipulated (condition 1: no header; condition 2: a right-wing header, e.g., finance; condition 3: a left-wing header, e.g., nature and environment). Visitors of a VAA developed for Utrecht, the fourth largest municipality in the Netherlands, were randomly guided to one of the versions of the tool in which the header type was varied. Results (based on Nrespondents = 27,404) show that providing a header (left-wing or right-wing) leads to more left-wing answers as compared a condition where there is no header above the attitude statement. This effect, however, is only observed for respondents with lower levels of political sophistication.

A new type of political attitude survey that has gained popularity in Europe and in the United States is the voting advice application (VAA). VAAs provide users with a voting advice based on their answers to a set of attitude questions. In the calculation of this advice, no-opinion answers are excluded. We tested the hypothesis that negative VAA questions lead to more no-opinion answers than their positive equivalents. In a field experiment, visitors (N=41,505) of a VAA developed for the municipality of Utrecht in the Netherlands, were randomly guided to one of the versions of the tool in which the polarity of 16 questions was manipulated. Results do not show an overall effect of question polarity. This overall null finding appears to be caused by contrasting effects for two subtypes of negative questions: Explicit negatives (e.g. not allow) yield more no-opinion answers than their positive counterparts (e.g. allow) do, while the reverse holds for implicit negatives (e.g. forbid).

Online Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are survey-like instruments that help citizens to shape their political preferences and compare them with those of political parties. Especially in multi-party democracies, their increasing popularity indicates that VAAs play an important role in opinion formation for citizens, as well as in the public debate prior to elections. Hence, the objectivity and transparency of VAAs are crucial. In the design of VAAs, many choices have to be made. Extant research in survey methodology shows that the seemingly arbitrary choice to word questions positively (e.g., 'The city council should allow cars into the city centre') or negatively ('The city council should ban cars from the city centre') systematically affects the answers. This asymmetry in answers is in line with work on negativity bias in other areas of linguistics and psychology. Building on these findings, this study investigated whether question polarity also affects the answers to VAA statements. In a field experiment (N = 31,112) during the Dutch municipal elections we analysed the effects of polarity for 16 out of 30 VAA statements with a large variety of linguistic contrasts. Analyses show a significant effect of question wording for questions containing a wide range of implicit negations (such as 'forbid' vs. 'allow'), as well as for questions with explicit negations (e.g., 'not'). These effects of question polarity are found especially for VAA users with lower levels of political sophistication. As these citizens are an important target group for Voting Advice Applications, this stresses the need for VAA builders to be sensitive to wording choices when designing VAAs. This study is the first to show such consistent wording effects not only for political attitude questions with implicit negations in VAAs, but also for political questions containing explicit negations.

In many countries with multiparty systems, a decline in class voting has increased volatility and the need for comprehensive information about the political landscape among voters. Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are online tools that match users to political parties and, as such, they hold a promise of reinforcing informational transparency and democratic representation. The current research investigated whether VAAs live up to this expectation by investigating to what extent VAAs affected users' political knowledge and vote choice in the Dutch national elections of 2012. Results show that VAA users feel that the VAA improved their political knowledge. In addition, those groups of VAA users who experienced a large knowledge increase, also relatively often indicated that their vote choice had been affected. This suggests that VAAs contribute to informational transparency by increasing knowledge among a potentially wide audience, and also that VAAs might increase democratic representation to the extent that VAAs persuade people to vote for the candidate that best represents their opinions. On the other hand, we found discrepancies between behavioural and perceptual measurements of the effect of VAAs on vote choice. This raises doubts about whether VAAs shape actual voting behaviours and knowledge, or rather perceptions of that.

Classroom discussion is frequently proposes as an essential part of democratic citizenship education. Literature, however, pays little attention to what kind of discussion is most effective and how teachers can facilitate a discussion. This study aims to contribute to the development of a framework for analysing the characteristics of classroom discussions and the different roles teachers can adopt in guiding a discussion on controversial issues. In addition, we investigated how the way teachers guide the discussion is related to the structure and content features of the discussion. The framework was used to analyse five classroom discussions in secondary education. Our framework appeared to be useful for revealing differences in the structure and content features of the classroom discussions and in the way teachers guide the discussion. The results also indicated that a high degree of teacher regulation was related to high content quality and more participation from students. A high degree of student regulation was linked to more genuine discussion among students. The study underlines the importance of taking account of the teacher's role in research into the effectiveness of classroom discussions for democratic citizenship education and the study makes useful suggestions for teachers when preparing for a classroom discussion.