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.

Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID)

The Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID) is the supra-regional scientific research support organization for psychology in German-speaking countries. It supports the entire scientific work process from gathering ideas and researching literature to documenting research, archiving data and publishing the results, based on an ideal-type research cycle.

It is committed to the idea of open science and sees itself as a public open science institute for psychology. As a research-based support institution, ZPID conducts basic application research in the area of research literacy and user-friendly research support. Further expansions of the research area are in progress around the topics of research syntheses in psychology and big data in psychology.

The central, free-of-charge services include the search portal PubPsych, the open access publishing platform PsychOpen and the psychology repository PsychArchives. New services for study planning, preregistration of psychological studies, data collection and data analysis are under development.

Important projects:

  • In its reference database PSYNDEX  (accessible, e.g., via the search portal PubPsych), ZPID documents scientific publications from the field of psychology and other scientific disciplines (e.g., educational and social sciences) related to educational research.
  • ZPID’s reference database PSYNDEX Tests (accessible via the search portal PubPsych) contains diagnostic tools from the field of educational psychology as well as related fields of application (e.g., pedagogics, curative education, speech therapy) which are well-suited for applications in educational assessment. An open access archive of psychological tests (“Elektronisches Testarchiv“) offers a number of assessment tools for research purposes.
  • PsychData – Research Data for Psychology
    With PsychData, the ZPID has developed a data-sharing platform specialized for psychology research.
  • In its research focus „Research Literacy and User-Friendly Research Support“, ZPID investigates information behavior in formal as well as informal learning contexts and develops interventions aimed at fostering information literacy.
  • ZPID is involved in research monitoring educational research in Germany.
  • ZPID conducts scientometric analyses to monitor the internationalization of educational research and Educational Psychology in German-speaking countries (ZPID Monitor).

Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi)

The Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi), which is affiliated with the University of Bamberg, promotes longitudinal studies in educational research in Germany. To achieve this aim, LIfBi runs the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) providing fundamental, transregional, and internationally significant, research-based infrastructure for empirical educational research in Bamberg. NEPS describes and analyzes the process of educational acquisition in Germany and its effects on individual educational processes and trajectories across the entire life span. In this way, NEPS is the first long-term study in Germany providing the national and international scientific community with longitudinal data on educational trajectories and competence development from early childhood to late adulthood.

NEPS is an interdisciplinary network of research institutes, research groups, and individual scientists that pulls together the expertise of about 220 scientists from more than 30 research sites across Germany.

Important work and services:

  • LIfBi runs the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). The NEPS collects longitudinal data that are representative of Germany on the development of competencies, educational processes, educational decisions, and returns to education in formal, nonformal, and informal contexts throughout the whole life span.
  • NEPS data are made available to the national and international scientific community in the form of Scientific Use Files that can be accessed through various innovative ways using state-of-the-art technology. Interested data users are invited to attend regular user trainings.
  • NEPS data provide an empirical basis for research and offer a rich potential for analysis with regard to educational research and related disciplines (e.g., demography, educational science, economics, psychology, and sociology).
  • In addition to the standard documentation material for every single Scientific Use File, the NEPS Research Data Center offers a number of supplemental information and assisting tools for handling the NEPS data.
  • The Research Data Center LIfBi (RDC LIfBi) is primarily responsible for the user-friendly preparation of survey and test data of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) and its dissemination to the scientific community in the form of Scientific Use Files.
  • Third-party funded projects by LIfBi: LIfBi continually acquires new third-party funded projects.