TOSCA

Starting point for the project „Transformation of the secondary school system and academic careers“ (TOSCA) was the unsatisfactory data base on the efficacy of senior grades education in Germany and the transition to university and vocational training. This is why TOSCA examined the educational biographies of high school graduates over the course of several years.

Learning Types

Homework is a central component of school education and is utilized with the intention to raise students’ performance. Nevertheless, in regards to the effect of the assignment and completion of homework there is a considerable gap between the intended educational relevance and its empirical validation.

The project addressed this gap of empirical research and explored this subject matter in four interrelated partial studies which reanalyzed longitudinally recorded data of almost 2000 eight-graders with the help of latent-profile-models.

ThinK

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?

Basic mathematical competencies

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 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.

NEPS

The German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) is a study carried out by the LIfBi. It is an interdisciplinary and multilocational network of excellence consisting of research institutes, research groups, and individual scientists. To find out more about the acquisition of education and its effects on individual life courses and to describe and analyze key educational processes and trajectories over the entire life span, this longitudinal study examines educational processes and competence development from early childhood to late adulthood. Data collected by NEPS are made available free of charge to international scientists aiming to study educational processes. Over the mid- and long-term, the design of NEPS will make an important contribution towards answering the following key questions:

  • How do competencies develop over the life course?
  • How do competencies influence decision-making processes at various critical transitions in educational careers (and vice versa)?
  • How and to what extent are competencies influenced by learning opportunities in the family, in the peer group, and in the learning environments of kindergarten, school, higher education, vocational training, and further education?
  • What competencies are decisive for obtaining educational qualifications, which for lifelong learning and which for a successful personal and social life?

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.

Personality and Education Effects (PEB)

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.

Follow-up study within the NEPS

Students who were in grade 9 in 2010 were interviewed since then on a regular basis within the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). After the first funding period, the NEPS-consortium excluded former students of special schools from the main sample in December 2013. Therefore, there was a need for external funding to continue with the “special school sample”.

There is a lack of data on educational trajectories and transitions of former students who graduated from special schools. However, NEPS data allowed an analysis of transitions from general school systems to either a transition or a vocational training system (after grade nine or ten). Nevertheless, it is not known if those transitions succeed or fail.

This research project continued surveys of those students on a regular basis and contributed to the following research questions:
  • How do they proceed through different educational stages (after grade nine or ten)?
  • Who are the ones experiencing a smooth transition from school to the vocational training system?
  • Who is dropping out and who is not making use of available options at all?
  • Which factors have an impact on the school-training-transition?
  • Do students from special schools differ regarding their development of competences?
  • Which measures support the transition to the vocational training system, which do not?
  • Is in-school-guidance perceived as more helpful compared to extracurricular guidance?
  • And are there differences between these students and those with similar competences from different school types?

It was expected to get profound insights into educational trajectories of former students of special schools. The dataset can be used as a German-wide reference data set to contextualize process-based data collected by the Federal Employment Agency.