For several decades, educational policy reforms have been understood as major instruments of educational governance that can impact existing educational practices, for instance, in terms of changes in teaching strategies, learning materials, and students' achievements (Fullan, 1983). However, in contrast to their huge sociopolitical relevance, scientific evaluations of such reforms are scarce (e.g., OECD, 2015). Rigorous evaluations and deeper investigations of reforms are of special societal

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... portance for several reasons: (a) to legitimize sometimes very controversial legislative policy decisions, which are to be implemented by the educational administration, (b) to test and minimize aspects of educational policies, which are predominantly based on normative arguments and which are now implemented as trial and error policies, and (c) to increase knowledge about when educational policy reforms and curricular programs lead to intended or unintended effects for students (e.g., Black & Wiliam, 2009; McConnell, 2010; Schaffer, Nesselrodt, & Stringfield, 1997). Moreover, formative and summative evaluations of educational policy reforms against objective standards (e.g., Campbell, 1969; Konstantopoulos & Hedges, 2008) are important for decreasing the likelihood of unintended side effects right from the start of their implementation. A systematic, empirically grounded evaluation of educational policy reforms is also of special importance in the face of the high complexity of the multilayered education system, where reforms are usually focused on impacting surface structures (e.g., Elmore, 1995) but shall actually trigger students' individual educational processes, for instance, competence growth. For these reasons, the effects of policy reforms are generally very complicated to anticipate during the construction and implementation of the reforms (Fusarelli, 2002; Young & Lewis, 2015). In the present dissertation, I investigate a variety of central psychological factors at the student level before and af [...]