Mathematics is a core competency that plays an important role in educational and professional success. The fact that particularly students in adolescence experience motivational slumps in mathematics reinforces the necessity of fostering motivation for mathematics. Initial US studies indicate that it is possible to favorably influence the motivation of students with the help of a simple intervention conducted in a classroom context.
The purpose of the project is to examine how well the motivation in mathematics instruction of 9th grade students can be enhanced based on these established intervention approaches.
What defines a good teacher? Not only is this the topic of the study but it is also a frequent matter of public debate. As of yet educational research lacks a clear theoretical concept and an instrument derived therefrom which renders educational and psychological knowledge empirically accessible.
This was the starting point of the ThinK research program which, devided into three sub-projects, pursued the following questions:
- How can educational psychological knowledge be conceptualized?
- How can it be captured reliably, validly and economically with the help of digital media?
- How significant is this knowledge for educational success?
- How do individual groups of teachers (i.e. teachers of varying educational contexts and subjects) differ?
Children that show deficits in mathematics at an early age, generally do not catch up on these and suffer from long term problems. Little is known about how these skills develop after pre-school and elementary school. Initial studies indicate that some of them carry these deficits with basic mathematical competencies all the way through secondary school. At present only scattered evidence is available that poor basic arithmetic skills cause substantial difficulties in technical skills development. Additionally there is a shortage of standardized testing procedures for secondary schools that are able to differentiate between academically weak students and other students across different grades and different types of schools.
These research gaps was intended to be closed within the framework of two tightly interlocked projects.
The project aimed to prepare a concept for the description of non-monetary return on education for the education report of the federal government on the basis of theoretical and empirical approaches. The subproject „Personality and education effects“ examined to what extent education variables predict personality changes in childhood and adolescence and whether these effects are independent of the students’ cognitive competences or whether the cognitive competences have an effect on personality beyond the influence of education. Furthermore the subproject investigated whether adults’ level of competence and (previous) participation in education determines personality pattern and changes. Additionally, interaction effects of personality and competences on outcome variables (e.g. life satisfaction) were examined. The central data sources are the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and especially the additional national longitudinal study PIAAC-L.
The common reference points of this network were the Hamburg-based longitudinal studies LAU (Aspekte der Lernausgangslage und Lernentwicklung, Aspects of Learning Background and Learning Development) and KESS (Kompetenzen und Einstellungen von Schülerinnen und Schülern, Competencies and Attitudes of Students), which have been conducted by the Free and Hanseatic city of Hamburg since 1995. Both studies followed a complete cohort of students from grade 5 until the general qualification for university entrance (Abitur) or the end of their apprenticeship. LAU and KESS included achievement tests and questionnaires on personal characteristics, schools and instruction, and students’ family Background.
LAU and KESS have been documented in descriptive reports and in a few in-depth analyses of selected issues. As is true of many data sets in the field of empirical educational research, the analytic potential of the LAU and KESS data is far from exhausted. Against this backdrop, the scientific consortium MILES was established in the summer of 2012 under the leadership of Prof. Olaf Köller. In accordance with an agreement between Hamburg’s Ministry of Schools and Vocational Training (Behörde für Schule und Berufsbildung, BSB) and the Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN), the LAU and KESS data have been made available to the MILES consortium for the purpose of conducting more detailed secondary analyses. Beginning in the winter of 2012/13, the data sets were gradually transferred to IPN. Since then, the documentation of the studies has been revised and completed. The rescaling of achievement data were completed with the goal of creating a scaling model that is consistent across all measurement points and the two studies. The RemoteMILES system was created as a way of making it possible to store the data at a central location and facilitating cooperation among the consortium members as they analyze the data. At the same time, members of the consortium have been identifying and discussing issues that the LAU and KESS data may be particularly helpful in analyzing. Focus areas included family-related interventions (tutoring, year abroad), school effectiveness and certain aspects of instruction (particularly bilingual instruction), as well as social disparities in academic success over the course of the school years. Either implicitly or explicitly, the research projects also addressed methodological challenges related to the elaborate study design. The members of the MILES consortium agreed on seven research projects to be conducted using the LAU and KESS data.
The federal state of Berlin initiated an evaluation of the Federal European School in Berlin (SESB). As part of the EUROPE study, from 2014 to 2017, the linguistic, subject-related and intercultural competence of SESB pupils were compared to those of conventionally taught pupils.
Furthermore, the study seeked to review the implementation of the SESB concept regarding the composition of the student body and the use of teachers, accompanied by a survey of parents.
A particular advantage of the EUROPE study was the assessment of competence in the non-German languages based on tests of the international student assessments TIMSS, PIRLS and PISA. This approach made it possible to compare the performances of the SESB pupils with those pupils from countries where these languages are actually spoken.
Since 2010 sixty Hector children academies have been created in the state of Baden-Württemberg with the financial funding of the Hector-Stiftung II in order to support highly gifted primary school students. The academic support and scientific monitoring is designed as a formative evaluation, so that vital findings of associated studies can be directly integrated into the work of the children academies.
The overall aim of the project is to examine to what extent the children academies contribute to a positive development of the talented and highly gifted primary school students. Furthermore the project aims at drawing generalizable findings that can later be used in the development and support of highly gifted children.
The study „Tradition and Innovation. Development at High Schools in Baden-Württemberg and Sachsen“ (TRAIN) seeked to help answering questions about the „effects“ of learning environments. TRAIN was a multicohort longitudinal study which examined the development of academic success, motivation, ability to perform and well-being during upper second track education and to what extent they are influenced by varying learning environments.
The TRAIN study addressed questions such as:
- Which academic, family, and individual premises are most beneficial for students’ learning?
- How do different school forms handle their students’ strengths and weaknesses?
- How well-prepared for their entry into the job market are students when they graduate?
- How can teaching be successful despite difficult circumstances?
The technological potential for separating work from the workplace is constantly increasing. Mobile devices, mobile internet access and remote access to firms’ internal networks and data allow for working anywhere at any time, i.e. Ubiquitous Working (UW). An interdisciplinary network of scholars used theory-based empirical research to explore the opportunities and challenges arising from UW. For this purpose, the project made use of rich data on both employees and employers in order to examine the diverse dimensions of UW that are relevant from the perspective of the involved disciplines – economics, work psychology, media psychology, occupational medicine, and sociology. The project’s objective was to bring together these disciplines in a closely collaborating network of institutions and scholars in order to gain deeper insights into the phenomenon of UW.
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).
