This research project explores the diffusion and perception of digital technologies in the German labor market. We measure diffusion via information conveyed in online job vacancies and perception via media reports. Concentrating on emerging digital technologies, we stress both, their potentials, such as wage and employment growth, and pitfalls, such as inequality and biased narratives. Our analyses rely on novel text data, which we partially construct ourselves, and modern Machine Learning and NLP methods to analyze textual data. By combining our text data with survey and administrative information, we are able to shed light on the impact of digitalization on Germany’s labor market outcomes and educational decisions from different perspectives.
ALICE
The Coronavirus Crisis has spurred an urgent need to support students’ learning via digital technologies. Digital technologies can also adapt to learners’ knowledge and skills and can adaptively provide them with learning materials and instruction that are tailored to their competence. However, this requires that the digital learning environment is able to model learners’ understanding and performance during the learning process and make predictions about each individual learners’ potential progress during the learning activity.
This project aims at establishing theoretical and methodological foundations for providing learners with adaptive support during mathematics and science education. To this end, the project combines four research strands, that are
1) developing digital learning materials that is based on learning-progressions in mathematics, biology, chemistry or physics.
2) Collecting authentic data from students who are engaging with this learning material in order to develop predictor models of how learners’ competence develops over time.
3) Reconstructing learners’ learning trajectories, and finally
4) investigating the effectiveness of different learning trajectories and developed instructional support that helps learners achieve their learning goals.
ReCo
The project “Automatic Response Coding” (ReCo) centers around text responses in tests. The computer programme ReCo automatically assesses whether a text response is correct, for example “The author aims at saving the trees.” as an answer in the PISA test. Moreover, ReCo extracts further features, for example whether a student adds knowledge to their response beyond the explicit information in the text.
The computer programme ReCo was originally developed at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the ZIB. In cooperation with both institutions, the Centre for Technology Based Assessment (TBA Centre) at DIPF is now developing the software package further. The project comprises the general software development as well as scientific studies employing ReCo. For this, TBA is responsible for the conceptual and technical development on the one hand and acts as the project manager for projects such as ReCo-Multi on the other hand. Also, TBA supports external research groups using the program.
OERinfo
The OER information centre offers a thematically specific online platform that provides the public at large and specialized target groups with comprehensive information regarding Open Educational Resources. Moreover, OERinfo will deliver the current state of art to practitioners, host information on best-practice examples, and reflect the diversity of existing initiatives.
A comprehensive knowledge base was thus constructed, offering edited thematic dossiers and systematically structured collections of information, with an enhanced scope, owing to integrated multimedia formats (e.g. podcasts, videos, didactically processed online modules) and communication platforms that are enriched by social media applications. Moreover, the project targeted the support of collaboration and networking among different OER actors and initiatives by offering suitable communication instruments, accompanying workshops and public relations work of the OER information centre.
In the second phase of the project (since November 2018), the focus of the further development and differentiation of the web platform was mainly on practical or application-oriented issues in the context of didactic-teaching use of freely licensed (digital) educational media. The active implementation of the OER paradigm in education and training should be further supported by workshops, training courses, and digital tools.
DATAFIED
On the First of December, the joint research project DATAFIED (DATA For and In EDucation) has been officially launched. Together with the GEI, the Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg (HSU), and the DIPF, the effects of the advancing digitisation and the attached datafication in the school education system will be investigated. Datafication, by the means of the school education system, can be perceived in a way that data is collected on all processes of the school system, which simultaneously influences decision-making and opinion-forming processes of various school actors (e.g. education policy, school supervision, school authorities, teachers, or parents).
Acquisiton of Knowledge in Geometry
How do basic competencies in geometry develop?
The project of the Leibniz Center of Excellence for Early Childhood Education focused on the promotion of children’s basic geometry competencies in preschool and the first years of school. The focus was on recognition and categorization of geometric figures as well as spatial navigation. The overarching question was how these basic geometry competencies can be enhanced and which role linguistic interactions play in this process. The project also seeked to identify whether promoting geometry competencies has an effect on processing of quantities and numbers or on arithmetic skills.
Digi-EBF
The framework program empirical education research of the BMBF contributes with its research focus on „Digitalization in Education” in the field of „Creating and Using Technological Developments in Education” to the “Education Offensive for the Digital Knowledge Society”. The meta project is coordinated by the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) which accompanies the projects of the research area.
It presents the results of the projects in an overall scientific and social framework, analyzes the developments in the research area in a scientific manner, identifies research gaps, and promotes the networking of researches with each other as well as the exchange with educational practice. For successfully handling these divers and extensive tasks the University of Duisburg-Essen works closely together with DIPF, DIE, and IWM. The meta project thus contributes to the further development of the research field and promotes the quality of the research area “Digitalization in the Field of Education”. The work done within the meta project strengthens the relevance of the research project for the educational practice, promotes collaboration between science and practice, and transmits central research results for the public.
Exchange of metadata
Ongoing exchange of metadata with continuous updates between ZPID reference database PSYNDEX and information infrastructures hosted at the DIPF (German Education Server und German Education Index | FIS Bildung Literaturdatenbank [only in German]). Exchange includes information and scientific publications from German-speaking countries in the fields of (a) Educational Psychology and (b) selected basic subjects of psychology.
Eduserver
The German Education Server (Eduserver) is a guide to educational information on the web and offers basic and high-quality information and internet resources to all interested parties – fast, up-to-date, comprehensively and free of charge. In its function as a meta-server, the Eduserver mainly refers to internet resources provided by the federal government (Bund) and the federal states (Länder) of Germany, the European Union, higher education institutions, schools, state institutes, non-university research institutes, science organisations, libraries, documentation centres or museums, structuring the information and presenting it in scholarly contexts. The Eduserver also supports the collaboration between the education servers of all federal states in Germany. It additionally offers the platform Education Worldwide and a guide to educational research in Germany.
VerbundFDB
In 2013 the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) commissioned the institutions DIPF, GESIS, and IQB to develop strategies for saving and re-using research data generated in the BMBF Framework Programme for Empirical Educational Research. Now, the Alliance for Research Data in Education (Verbund Forschungsdaten Bildung, VerbundFDB) is the central contact for research data and research data management in educational science. It has been commissioned to archive research data as well as assessment instruments and to make these data and instruments available to the scientific community. This includes data from qualitative and quantitative studies, e.g. text data, video data, survey data, and achievement data. Moreover, VerbundFDB provides assessment instruments and documentation material, e.g. code books and scale documentations. A further priority is the training, consultation, and provision of information material on the topic of research data management. VerbundFDB offers the following services to researchers:
- Infrastructure and counselling concerning archiving and sharing research data and research instruments
- Provision of a central search engine for studies, data and assessment instruments from different data centres for secondary use
- Trainings, information material, and individual advice concerning research data management, for instance on data management plans, legal and ethical requirements in assessing and processing data, as well as data archiving.