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Selected Current Research Projects

From 1st August 2023, Dr Matthias Forell, research associate in the research group School Research), will support the setting up of Education Y, a foundation established in 2022. The foundation is chaired by Prof. Dr. Rita Süssmuth, former Federal Minister for Youth, Family and Health and former President of the German Bundestag. With its 54 employees, the educational organisation promotes educational equality and focuses on education in challenging situations as well as education in the digital age.

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From 1st August 2023, within the framework of the competence network lernen:digital, competence centres for school development have been launched. In addition to support from Joachim Wirth from RUB, Gabriele Bellenberg and Matthias Forell from the research group School Research have also become part of the DigiSchuKuMPK network (https://lernen.digital/verbuende/digischukumpk/). We are looking forward to exciting and cooperative collaboration.

Participating researchers: Prof. Dr. Falk Scheidig

Third party funding: State Parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia

Duration: December 2022-May 2023

Abstract: Parliamentary visits and outreach activities provide insights into everyday life in politics, stimulate engagement with political processes and content, and enable encounters with political actors. As non-formal educational offerings, they provide a framework for political education outside of the classroom, for all age groups. This project focuses on the question of how and with what effect parliamentary visits and outreach activities are received. It is carried out on behalf of the president of the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia. Within the context of the project, the visitors programme in the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia will first be investigated, focusing on the composition, interests, impressions and learning outcomes of the visitors. Secondly, local outreach events and mobile exhibitions in schools organized by the parliament’s visitors’ service will be analysed in terms of how they are used and evaluated by students and teachers. In this way, the project aims to gain insights into the possibilities, forms of use and effects of political education opportunities in non-formal contexts, using parliamentary visits and outreach activities as an example.
 


Participating researchers: Kristin Flugel and Dr. Katharina Vogel (project staff), Prof. Dr. Norbert Ricken and Prof. Dr. Joachim Scholz (project directors), Dr. Henning Röhr, Marco Lorenz, Friederike Thole.

Third party funding: DFG

Duration: 2022-2025

Abstract: The research project is part of the Collaborative Research Centre "Virtual Environments " (SFB 1567, Director: Stefan Rieger), established at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. The starting point of the sub-project "Virtual Education" is the observation that virtual objects, settings, and practices are already used in educational settings in a more natural and diverse way than is often assumed in the debates on the 'digitalisation of education'. Virtual reality, in all its facets of meaning, has long since become a hallmark of educational and knowledge environments and shapes not only knowledge acquisition and knowledge creation practices (intertwined with these in the context of digital platforms and their data production), but also respective approaches and choices. Against this background, the project aims to research practices and forms of educational knowledge in virtual contexts and investigates their formation and transformation. It is designed to be both present-oriented (sub-project B03.1, Norbert Ricken) and historical (sub-project B03.2, Joachim Scholz). In this context, the concept of ‘Bildungswissens’ (educational knowledge) (Ricken, Reh, Scholz 2022), is used to analyse the knowledge practices and orders associated with ‘Bildung’ (education) – since its establishment around 1800 – from a decidedly knowledge-theoretical and historical perspective. The term 'educational knowledge' not only refers to the knowledge and the practices that constitute it, which the older generation has always tried to pass on to the younger generation, but also to a specific structure and a specific form of thematisation and reflection on knowledge in an intergenerational perspective. In its form as a specific 'knowledge about knowledge', educational knowledge therefore allows the perspective analysis of knowledge cultures.

The object of investigation of this project is intially knowledge practices in the field of so-called 'higher education'. The focus, on the one hand, is on programmes and, on the other hand, on a heterogeneous bundle of knowledge practices, which are heuristically differentiated into practices of text acquisition and discussion, the ordering of knowledge and examination and finally its processing and subsequent formation in a post-examination phase. At the same time, the types of knowledge formed in these practices are analysed with regard to their orders, logics and functions and related to knowledge cultures and their formations and transformations. Thus, four question from different perspectives will guide the research:
(1) How do forms and practices of educational knowledge take shape in pedagogical (life) worlds that are characterised by virtuality and by which structural moments are they defined?
(2) Which knowledge cultures and orders result from these knowledge practices and how are worlds of knowledge and imagination that are characterised by virtuality structured in terms of their epistemic subject forms (subjectification) and epistemic object forms (objectification)?
(3) To what extent and in what respects can we currently speak of a change, a transformation of educational knowledge with regard to the history of educational and knowledge practices since 1800? 
(4) How can educational knowledge be conceptualised praxeologically and made fruitful as a systematic concept for educational research?
 



Beteiligte Forscher: Niklas Obergassel, Julian Roelle

Drittmittelgeber: DFG

Laufzeit: 10/21 - 09/24

Zusammenfassung: The learning of declarative concepts (i.e., the learning of key terms and corresponding definitions of abstract concepts) constitutes a common learning objective in almost every learning domain. In view of this common and cross-domain learning objective, the question on how to effectively foster the learning of declarative concepts has been widely addressed in educational psychological research. As a main result of the numerous studies conducted, tasks that mainly engage learners in knowledge construction by encouraging them to organize and elaborate on the learning materials (i.e., generative learning tasks) and tasks that mainly engage learners in retrieval practice by encouraging them to retrieve the introduced declarative concepts from memory (i.e., retrieval practice tasks) have emerged as being particularly helpful in supporting the acquisition of declarative concepts. However, although both types of tasks are not only evidently effective in fostering the learning of declarative concepts but also fulfill theoretically complementary functions for learning (i.e., generative learning tasks predominantly improve the structure of mental representations, whereas retrieval practice tasks predominantly consolidate existing mental representations), to date, very little research has dealt with the question of how the two types of learning task can be combined in the learning of declarative concepts such that the potential of knowledge construction and retrieval practice can be jointly exploited. Against this background, the aim of this project is to investigate in three experiments, whether, how, and depending on which conditional factors generative learning tasks and retrieval practice tasks can be effectively combined in learning declarative concepts.

 

 

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Participating researchers: Prof. Dr. Gabriele Bellenberg, Dr. Denise Demski

Third party funding: BMBF

Duration: April 2022-March 2025

Abstract: The ABBAUBAR project investigates the extent to which a demand-oriented management of the state’s use of resources can contribute to the reduction of educational barriers and thus potentially promote social participation. In the context of needs-based resource management, schools with difficult social conditions, for example, receive additional resources for their work, for example in the form of additional teacher positions or school social workers. The systematic knowledge about the effectiveness of demand-oriented resource management gained in the project is particularly useful for educational administration and practice in further shaping the reform approach. Close cooperation with four municipalities allows the findings to flow directly into the implementation of demand-oriented resource management; other measures (e.g. workshops, specialist conferences, publications) also ensure transfer to the wider community.
 

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Participating researchers: Marc Stadtler, Sandra Aßmann, Philipp Marten

Third party funding: Deutsche Telekom Foundation

Duration: July 2022-June 2025

Abstract: The aim of the project is to contribute to the promotion of resilience in the face of misinformation on the internet and to foster the self-determined participation of young people in the knowledge of our society. To this end, teaching and learning scenarios will be developed, implemented in school and extracurricular educational settings, and evaluated using the methods of quantitative educational research with regard to competence gains and conditions for success. The project addresses both young people and multipliers (persons, institutions, publications, media, etc. that pass on information),  for whom online training and webinars are offered.
 

 

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Participating researchers: Prof. Dr. Sandra Aßmann, Prof. Dr. Nikol Rummel, Prof. Dr. Christian Bunnenberg

Third party funding: BMBF

Duration: May 2020-April 2023

Abstract: Memorials and museums are increasingly using digital media to convey history. Virtual reality (VR) applications have a particular appeal in this context, as they make the past more vivid and tangible than is possible, for example, in classroom lectures. However, immersion in virtual worlds also carries the risk that learners are left alone with the experience and adopt the representations unreflectively as an image of the past. Especially in the case of emotionally upsetting topics, it is still unknown how people reflect on what they have seen, heard and experienced in virtual environments.

This is where the joint project comes in, combining expertise in history didactics, educational science and social and media psychology in order to track down the phenomenon of waking up from virtual worlds and subsequent communication about the experience. Together with the software developer ATINO, researchers from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the University of Duisburg-Essen are investigating the experiences of young people and adults with history-related VR applications. In doing so, they shed light in particular (by means of a specially developed app) on the digitally supported reflection on learning content after the learners have left the virtual environment. They also examine the emotional impact and the understanding of the historical situation. The overarching questions of the project are:

What is the role of social and virtual interactions in relation to reflection processes?
How can isolation and emotionality be counteracted as a result of using VR applications?
What is the significance of shifting the reflection process into virtual space?

The researchers are cooperating closely with two memorial sites that already use VR applications in order to compare the results of their work with VR applications in school student labs and in memorial sites. The results of the research project will contribute to a better understanding of educational processes in virtual reality and to the didactical development of educational work at extracurricular learning centres such as museums and memorials. The researchers will also provide information on how software needs to be designed to appropriately accompany VR experiences. The results will also be used in the training and continuing professional development of teachers.
 

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Participating researchers: Prof. Dr. Angela Sasse, Prof. Dr. Nikol Rummel, Dr. Veelasha Moonsamy, Prof. Dr. Florian Meißner 

Third party funding: German Federal Ministry of Education and Research

Duration: 15 September 2022-14 September 2025

Abstract: The project aims to develop and evaluate methods and tools to increase the digital fitness of citizens in the area of IT security and privacy. Within the framework of the advertised position, a learning concept for increasing digital fitness is to be developed and evaluated. As a first step, an experimental survey of current mental models of IT security risks and threats will be conducted and evaluated. Based on this, a learning concept for the transformation of incomplete and/or incorrect mental models will be developed and evaluated and optimised in experimental studies.
 


Participating researchers: Prof. Dr. Joachim Scholz

Third party funding: DFG

Duration: Until June 2026

Abstract: The is a subproject of the Collaborative Research Centre "Virtual Environments". It explores knowledge practices of university study in an ethnographic-contemporary context and is accompanied by an additional historical subproject. For selected disciplines of the humanities, notions of proper study as well as practices of acquiring, organising and testing knowledge are reconstructed. The historical sub-project focuses on the time periods 1800 and 1900 as phases of upheaval. 
 

 

 


Participating researchers: Prof. Dr. Nikol Rummel, Sebastian Strauß, Ann-Christin Falhs (RUB), Prof. Knut Neumann (IPN Kiel), Prof. Ulrike Cress (IKM Tübingen), Prof. Hendrik Drachsler (Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, Frankfurt)

Third party funding: Leibniz Association (Leibniz Gemeinschaft)

Duration: April 2021-March 2024

Abstract: Digital learning environments can be used to model learners' understanding and performance during the learning process and to make predictions about each learner's potential progress. The interdisciplinary project "ALICE" (Analysing Learning for Individualized Competence development in mathematics and science Education) addresses this by providing theoretical and methodological foundations for adaptive support of learners in mathematics and science lessons. To this end, digital learning materials are being developed and tested, and predictive models of the development of learners’ skills are being created based on the data obtained. The reconstruction of the learning pathways will be followed by an analysis of the effectiveness of the various paths as well as the didactic support developed with regard to the learning objectives to be achieved.