The competence network lernen:digital shapes the dialogue between science and practice for the digital transformation of schools and teacher training. The transfer centre makes the results of the learning:digital competence network visible to teachers, promotes co-constructive further development with practitioners and supports the nationwide transfer to teacher training. The DIE contributes its expertise in promoting the professional development of teaching staff by addressing these issues, among others:
- How can the coordination of action by relevant actors in digitisation-related teacher training be described?
- What are the conducive and obstructive conditions for transfer in digitisation-related teacher training?
- How should digitisation-related qualification programmes for multipliers be designed?
The transfer office acts as an interface within the competence network lernen:digital and thus ensures systematic dialogue between science and practice. The activities and services of the transfer centre are divided into four fields of action: networking, research, transfer and science communication. The central tasks are the consolidation of scientific expertise in the project networks into competence centres, benefit-inspired research on transfer-relevant issues and networking with the state institutes for teacher training, education administration and education policy. One of the DIE’s main objectives is the development of formats for the professionalisation of multipliers in digitisation-related further and continuing training for teachers. Another focus is on analysing the coordination of action by the groups of actors in the education system and the conditions for successful transfer.
The international network “In Search of the Good Teacher” brings together researchers from Canada, the USA, the Netherlands, Germany, England and Australia. The network is funded by the European Association of Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI) and coordinated by DIPF and the University of York.
Theoretical development: Up to now, disparate lines of research on teacher quality have existed independently of each other. The network now aims to bring these lines of research together for future research.
Methodological development: Only a few standardized instruments measuring teacher quality in international contexts exist. In this network, researchers work jointly on further improvement and validation. In the spirit of Open Science these standardized instruments will be made available to the research community.
Interdisciplinarity: The networks focus lies on interdisciplinarity. Questions about “good” teachers may need input from different fields such as psychology, educational science, or experts in subject matter.
Practical impact: These findings can contribute to the creation of effective teacher education:
- Teacher selection: Who should enter the teaching profession? Which features should one look for when recruiting teachers?
- Teacher training and continuing education: How important are aspects such as subject-matter knowledge or motivation? How can they be fostered?
Project Objectives: The aim of the research group is two-fold: First, it links the theoretical approaches in a collective model. Second, establishing new research connections. This is done both through the sharing and advancing teacher assessment instruments, and through joint work on existing study data and the planning of new cooperative studies that allow for a high degree of generalization.
Research syntheses are an increasingly used method in educational and behavioural sciences to gain an evidence-based overview of relevant aspects or topics. Evidence is due to the complete and systematic assessment and selection of relevant publications and structured synthesis of findings from literature. A multitude of approaches has been developed in this context occasionally involving AI tools. The project targets a standardization of the documentation of research syntheses and resulting heterogeneous data.
On the one hand, the project addresses researchers acting as data suppliers who are in need of support for transparent documentation and processing of FAIR data. Researchers will also be enabled to reuse other scientists’ research synthesis data. Research data thus need to be researchable so they can be assessed according to individual needs and used in the individual research settings.
ForSynData also addresses research data centres that curate and make available data in educational science and psychology and act as intermediaries between data givers – suppliers – and users of research syntheses.
The project is subdivided into four work packages that are coequally processed and run by DIPF and ZPID which focuses on research syntheses from psychology while DIPF focuses on syntheses from education.
First of all, a heuristic analysis will serve to assess relevant research syntheses from both disciplines – based on existing classifications found in the literature relating to different types. Reproducibility is checked. Criteria for reproducibility are geared towards research synthesis guidelines and the FAIR principles. The developed guidelines will be presented to focus groups of experts for evaluation purposes. Focus is placed on the comprehensibility of guidelines and the implementation of documentations with respect to assessing potentials of reusability – i.e. assessment of needs and data quality. Necessary metadata standards will be prepared for the final guidelines to sustainably curate research syntheses. Processing and documentation of guidelines will be linked to a close cooperation of staff at the research data centres involved. The metadata will be aligned to existing research data management standards – linking up to work by KonsortSWD, “Linking Textual Data”, “Open Data Format” and the NFDI section in charge of metadata. The final work package addresses an evaluation of processes for data publication and reusage involving research data centres as data curators and researchers as data suppliers of data and data users.
Which research data are needed to drive research of societal contexts and phenomena? How can these data be documented and made available, how can they be indexed and networked, to facilitate excellent research? Together with other partners, DIPF engages in setting up KonsortSWD, the national research data infrastructure for social, behavioural, educational and economic sciences.
KonsortSWD targets a further development of the existing research data infrastructure as a joint venture, stopping existing gaps and extending the infrastructure in a sustainable way.
MEChS is one of five projects grown out of the scientific MILES (Methodological Issues in Longitudinal Educational Studies) -consortium, which is coordinated by the Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN) at Kiel. In this co-operative project data from two longitudinal studies LAU (Aspects of learning background and learning development) and KESS (Competencies and attitudes of students), which have been conducted during the 1990s and the 2000s in Hamburg, was reanalyzed with the aim of answering methodological and substantial questions of longitudinal research in depth.
The Technology based Testing (TBT) work package is part of the NEPS methods group and is located at the DIPF in the TBA centre (Centre for Technology-Based Assessment). There it is under the scientific leadership of Prof. Dr. Frank Goldhammer and scientific co-leadership of Dr. Daniel Schiffner as well as the operational leadership of Dr. Lena Engelhardt. NEPS-TBT works closely with the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) and is concerned with innovative survey and test methods, for example, computer- and Internet-based skills testing.
The TBT work package supports the implementation of Technology based testing in NEPS, especially in the domains of reading and mathematics, with science-based services, project-specific adaptations of software products, and accompanying scientific research.
The education system in Afghanistan is facing an array of challenges. On behalf of the Federal Foreign Office, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit supports three model schools in Kabul in meeting these. The goal is to improve learning conditions by enhancing the qualifications of teachers, providing modern teaching materials and improving the schools’ infrastructures. Part of the project is to identify particularly gifted students amongst applicants to the schools with an efficient, transparent and fair selection process. To this end, the Department for Education and Development at DIPF develops test items for assessing working memory capacity and general cognitive ability. In cooperation with Prof. Dr. Samuel Greiff at the University of Luxembourg, items for assessing complex problem solving tasks are developed. These measurement tools will be implemented in the CBA ItemBuilder, with support from the Centre for Technology Based Assessment (TBA). This will ensure that the tools deliver results without potential outside influences which can be evaluated automatically. The biggest challenges in the development of these assessment tools lie in their cultural adaptation and their computer-based implementation and evaluation.
The project “A Virtual Research Environment for the History of Education based on a Semantic Wiki Technology (Semantic MediaWiki for Collaborative Corpora Analysis: Semantic CorA)” targeted the development of a virtual research environment (VRE) based on Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) for a collaborative analysis of comprehensive digitised text corpora and an exemplary sustained nesting into the professional community of researchers in the history of education. Moreover, the project aimed to provide for a possible further use of the enrichment and analysis works of the researchers and in the long term, an infrastructural distribution of the VRE (Semantic CorA) to other disciplines with community building.
The study, which is jointly financed by the German Research Society (DFG) and the Swiss National Fond (SNF) and a co-operative effort between the Department for Educational Governance at DIPF, the Pedagogical University Basel (FHNW), the University Fribourg and the University of Tübingen investigates the permeability of different school systems in Germany and Switzerland, as well social disparities at the transition into post-compulsory training.
School systems in Switzerland and Germany are characterized by different transitions throughout a students’ school career. The transition from compulsory school education to post-compulsory education and training is particularly relevant as it is here that individual professional biographies are predetermined. Evidence regarding this transition demonstrated a socially selective nature of this transition. The research project focused on the transition to post-compulsory education and training with respect to the degree of permeability of certain school systems, social disparities as well as the influence ofstudents’ effort and interest during this transition. A random sample of approx. 4,000 ninth year students from all school types was assessed in three different school systems – on in Germany (Baden-Württemberg) and two in Sitzwerland (Basel-Stadt, Deutschfreiburg). The study aimed to provide policy insights on how best to design the transition from compulsory school education to post-compulsory vocational education and training.
As a project within the framework of the “Science Year 2022 – Participate!”, enorM was divided into a mobilization phase and an interaction phase, in which the coordination office of the Leibniz Education Research Network participated.
During the mobilization phase, the project collected questions and ideas from students about learning in the future: at several local schools, via a broad social media campaign and, in particular, via the website lernen-von-morgen.de. At the online “Education Future Camp” on April 2, 2022 the submitted questions were organized and weighted together with interested students. In the subsequent interaction phase, the students interacted with researchers, met them online in “Book a Question” sessions, discussed with them at a hackathon and produced their own podcast series. In collaboration with an agency, a computer game – a digital escape room – was developed, which provides children and young people a completely different approach to learning in the future.
Students were also involved in this project: In a workshop with the agency, they helped develop the game idea and provided feedback on test versions during the production period. The computer game includes visualizations of the discussions between students and researchers as well as the podcast episodes. It is available on the website www.lernen-von-morgen.de beyond the project period.
The project serves the exchange and transfer of experiences from educational practice to research. In addition, the aim is to break new ground in science communication with new presentation and event formats.
