Teachers had a special responsibility during the COVID 19 pandemic. With the school closures in March 2020, they had to abruptly adapt to unprecedented forms of distance learning and support their students in their remote learning. The TeaCop study investigated how well teachers are coping with the challenges posed by the pandemic. Characteristics of successful coping include both teachers’ well-being and the quality of their teaching during the pandemic. It was also investigated which individual and contextual factors explain differences in teachers’ successful adaptation to these challenges. To this end, data from the DFG-funded longitudinal study COACTIV-expeRt was drawn on.
Digi-EBF II
The meta-project (Digi-EBF II) is part of the Empirical Educational Research framework programme and the BMBF research focus ‘Digitalisation in Education’. It pursues the overarching goals of advancing research on education and digitalisation, making it visible and shaping it in collaboration with practitioners.
Coordinated by the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE), the project brings together the UDE, DIPF, DIE and IWM. The network sees itself as a service provider for the projects funded by the research centre, whose services are based on research findings that have already been obtained (Digi-EBF I) and are currently being collected (Digi-EBF II).
In Digi-EBF II, measures and practices of co-construction are identified, programmes are created to enable and shape transfer and own research is conducted to develop the challenges and potentials of co-construction and transfer in education. In the sense of design-oriented educational research, approaches to cooperation with the funded projects are reflected upon and discussed in reflection meetings and dialogue formats with educational practice and bridging actors and introduced into a broader discourse. The meta-project networks the funded projects with each other and within the research community on content-related, methodological and transfer-related topics. The state of research on practice-relevant issues relating to education and digitalisation is compiled in research syntheses, prepared in a practice-oriented manner and disseminated via appropriate channels. Accompanying these activities, various formats of knowledge transfer (dialogue formats, knowledge products and online portals) are researched and used.
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.
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.
COLD
For actively participating in school, daily life or at work excellent German language skills are needed. While learning a new languague teachers have a key role in teaching German as a second language. The project COLD (Competencies of school teachers and adult educators in teaching German as a second language in linguistically diverse classrooms) focuses on the following questions:
- What skills and knowledge do teachers have?
- How do they structure their lessons?
- Are there any differences between school teachers and adult educators?
The project is a cooperation between DIE and the MI and is led by the DIE.
From April 2019 until September 2022 researchers will focus on professional competencies of school teachers and adult educators in teaching German as a second language in linguistically heterogeneous groups. The project adresses the special needs in teaching and didactics which occured through the immigration of children, teenagers and adults. The surveys take place in real teaching situations in preparatory classes and integration courses.
The interdisciplinary project team includes experts in adult education, subject-related didactics German/German as a second language, empirical educational research, linguistics, computer lingustics, and psychology. The project is mainly performed by PhD students so that a special focus on promoting young researches is set.
INSIDE
In two project phases, INSIDE provides comprehensive and reliable information for the first time on the current implementation of school inclusion at lower secondary level and on the transition of pupils with special educational needs to upper secondary level, the vocational training system or another life situation. INSIDE creates a sound data basis by surveying various groups of people involved in inclusion, such as children and young people with and without special educational needs, parents, teachers, school management and school support staff. On the one hand, this can contribute to the creation of a basis for political objectives to promote inclusion in everyday school life and at the transition to education and work, and on the other hand it is made available to the scientific community for further research purposes.
LAP
In what way are teacher education students different from other students with regards to their interests, occupational orientation, and previous educational biographies? To what extent are teacher education students equipped with domain-specific basic competencies such as, for example, reading competence as well as mathematical competence and scientific literacy? And how are study progress and success connected to the level of these competencies? How does the perceived quality of the preparatory service (“Referendariat”) affect the professional career? And does the professional self-concept change during the course of this second training period?
With the continuation of an additional sample of teacher education students from the NEPS Starting Cohort 5 and by adding survey content specific to the teaching profession to this investigation it will be possible to answer these and similar research questions. Due to its longitudinal approach following teacher education students from the beginning of their studies to their professional lives and also taking into account their life course prior to studying, the project will considerably improve the data pool regarding teacher education. The collected database will be made available as an infrastructure service to the national and international research community.
The Assessment of Teacher’s Instructional Quality in National Large-Scale Studies
Instructional design is of crucial significance in students’ educational progress. It is often possible to make connections between aspects of classroom management, student-orientation, or the level of stimulus with the learning progress in mathematics or German. However, measuring or assessing such qualitative characteristics remains a great challenge.
The project addressed the quality of student evaluations. Both established analytical models for the evaluation of nested verdicts were reviewed and frequently used survey instruments (items) were processed.
PISA Plus
PISA Plus was a longitudinal national add-on study to the PISA 2012 survey in which the performance of the same students was tested who had been tested one year before. The study used PISA-tasks as well as tasks of the competence-test for education standards.
The study aimed to show perceptions on the influencing factors of students’ competence development and to motivate developing and validating methods for data evaluation (control sampling, scaling of performance data).
The research focused on the following question:
- What kind of increases in competencies and knowledge can be made through PISA tests and other tests for reviewing the accomplishing of education standards within the academic year?
- What influencing factors can be seen on the development of (mathematical) competencies of students by repeating classes?
- What characteristics in teaching classes are influencing the performance and motivational development of students?
- Are there reciprocal correlations between competencies, motivational characteristics and interests of students?
- What are the impacts of social and immigration related characteristics for developing competencies?
- What effects on student competencies do school level related factors have in the face of teaching structure and outcome?
KANSAS
This research and development project aimed at developing, testing and evaluating the web-based search engine KANSAS. KANSAS will support teachers in adult literacy and German as a second language in preparing classes. Using the search engine, teachers will be enabled to determine both the topic and the linguistic complexity of texts to be searched on the internet and in electronic corpora. Taking into account the learners interests as well as their individual level of reading competence, KANSAS allows teachers to perfectly adjust the query to the needs of their course participants. Moreover, teachers can upload self-developed texts in order to analyze the language complexity. In addition to that, a simplified version of KANSAS will be developed, enabling advanced learners to search for texts with an appropriate level of language complexity on their own.
The interdisciplinary project KANSAS was conducted by the three collaboration partners under direction of the German Institute for Adult Education – Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning. The German Institute of Adult Education (DIE) carried out several usability and quasi-experimental studies to evaluate the efficacy of the search engine. The MI examined the didactic suitability of the texts searched by KANSAS. Computational linguists of the University of Tübingen technically implemented the search engine and adapted it to the users’ needs. In close collaboration of all partners involved, several developmental versions of the search engine were released during the project term in order to test and optimize KANSAS.
