Adaptive education as a pedagogical concept describes a matching of educational contents and teaching/learning methods to the individual requirements of students by differentiation and individualization. This matching results of a continuously diagnose of the students’ competencies and needs during the whole learning process and it aims to improve the students’ performance (Wang 1992; Crono & Snow 1986). A number of studies pointed out that the implementation of adaptive teaching and learning increased the working attitudes, the motivation and the self-responsibility for the own learning processes, the social abilities and the academic performance of students (Wang 1992; Wang & Birch 1984; Wang & Zollers 1990; Waxman, Wang, Anderson & Walberg 1987; Hardy, Jonen, Möller & Stern 2006). Yet, the capability of adaptive education for teaching and learning in heterogeneous groups is primarily discussed on the basis of intervention studies. In these studies predominantly the improvement of particular attitudes and abilities resp. the students’ academic performance was in the focus while the classroom interaction was not taken into account.

Focusing the classroom interaction, I am interested in the relation of the teachers’ abilities to create adaptive learning offers within individualized environments and the students’ abilities to use these opportunities for their own learning processes. I assume that both, the teachers’ and students’ abilities or competencies (Weinert 2001) are to conceptualize as generic structures that consists partly of theoretical knowledge, e.g. pedagogical content knowledge, domain-specific knowledge, knowledge of teaching resp. learning methods and strategies etc., and implicit knowledge, e.g. teaching and learning routines (cf. Neuweg 2001; Martens & Asbrand 2009). In classroom-interaction teaching and learning competencies interact in a complex way so that matching of teaching and learning often emerges situational. Through interaction analyses I try to describe under which conditions these matching emerge and in how far they are a resource for learning processes.

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