Editorial

The individual articles address various aspects of empirical research in subject-specific didactics. Based on a principal component analysis of eleven variables related to lesson design and task preference, Marco Rehm and Ekkehard A. Köhler (Centre for Economic Education, University of Siegen) have developed a subject-specific typology of social studies teachers. Annika Lilja, Anna-Maria Hipkiss, Miranda Rocksén, Christina Osbeck, Anne Solli, Jessica Rahm, and Maria Svensson (Department of Pedagogical, Curricular and Professional Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden) examine situation-specific subject teaching to contribute to a better understanding of the details of teachers' subject-specific didactic competence. The article by Ann-Sophie Winklmaier and Jan Christoph Schubert (Department of Subject-Specific Education Research, Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg) focuses on how general and subject-specific constructs (in this case, geography-specific) shape prospective geography teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs regarding inclusive geography teaching.

In the ‘Special Issue’ section, Stefan Keller (University of Teacher Education Zürich) and Volker Frederking (Department of Subject-specific Education Research of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) present five articles under the title “Reading, Writing and Interpreting Texts in Digital Environments”. These contributions bring together key areas in first, foreign, and second language teaching.

In their article “Judging Students’ Texts in a Digital Research Tool”, Frederike Strahl, Jörg Kilian, and Jens Möller (Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education at Kiel University) examine how teachers evaluate their students' texts when assessments occur in a digital environment. In “Accelerating Secondary Students’ Learning Progression in Scientific Argumentation using Artificial Intelligence”, Thorben Jansen, Hannah Pünjer, Nils-Jonathan Schaller, Luca Bahr, and Lars Höft (Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education at Kiel University) show how AI functionalities can be systematically aligned with evidence-based pedagogy to promote learning progress in argumentation writing. Stefan D. Keller, Ruth Trüb, Andrea Horbach, Johanna Fleckenstein, and Thorben Jansen (University of Teacher Education Zürich) present in their article “Mastering the genre of English emails” a linguistic analysis of semi-formal inquiry emails as a key genre of writing in English as a foreign language in an online learning environment. In their article “Virtual Reality in Language Learning and Teaching” Claudia Finkbeiner, Wiebke Sophie Ost, and Claudia Schlaak discuss the results of an exploratory study on four VR applications from a student perspective. In his article “Reliability of AI in the Domain of Literary Literacy and Literary Text Interpretation” Volker Frederking (Department of Subject-specific Education Research, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg) presents the results of an experimental study, that examined the reliability of generative AI in the field of literary learning in L1 education using the examples of ChatGPT 5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5.

We want to express our sincere thanks to the staff of the professorship “General Subject Didactics” at the University of Vienna, whose hard work and commitment made this publication possible: Karin Sima for her technical work, Ela Luria for proofreading and last but not least, Augustine L. Fleischmann for her editorial work.

Finally, we thank the ‘Gesellschaft für Fachdidaktik’ (Society for Subject Didactics; GFD) for the financial support, without which this journal would not be possible.

Volker Frederking and Martin Rothgangel