Educational Psychology
Faculty 05

AKGU is a DigiTeLL partnership project, which goal is to make competence-oriented adaptive e-exams usable for the teaching staff of the Goethe University. For this purpose, the KAT-HS app developed at the GU for the construction, administration and analysis of adaptive e-exams will be further developed, tested and evaluated and finally made widely usable. After completion of the project, higher education teachers at the GU will have the unique opportunity to use competence-oriented, adaptive e-exams in accordance with current scientific standards.

Projekt management: Aron Fink

Project team members from the work unit: Lara Weiß, Jan Luca Schnatz

Duration: 01.04.2022 – 31.03.2023

Identifying and reducing corona-related educational disadvantage - Transfer (CoBi+)

The CoBi-Transfer project is an extension of the effective CoBi support system. During the past school year, the CoBi support system was developed, applied, and evaluated. The CoBi support system consists of an online screening and educational-psychological counseling for adolescents in 8th - 12th grade. Students are offered the opportunity to voluntarily take part in a screening to receive reliable feedback on their learning behavior, their ability to control themselves and their individual risk of not attaining their school-leaving certificate. Building on this, students who are at risk are offered professional individual psychological counselling.

The scientific evaluation of the CoBi support system showed significant positive effects in school-related self-efficacy expectation, media-related self-control ability, and action control in learning situations. This means that the learning prerequisites of the students could be improved overall and in aspects that are expected to have a long-term effect.

The CoBi+ counseling consists of five appointments, which take place at intervals of 14 days and for which premises are required in the respective school. The counseling will take place at the schools in the afternoon, supplementing the lessons. It is carried out by specially trained students from Goethe University Frankfurt with a background in educational psychology. Our counselors are supported by psychologists and a licensed psychological psychotherapist from the MAINKIND counseling center.

The CoBi+ counseling service is based on the pillars of motivation, emotional well-being and media-related self-control. In practice, we work with the young people on their goals and on their learning organization so that they are able to achieve their goals and successfully complete learning processes. The counseling does not replace tutoring in specific subjects or psychotherapy, but aims at improving the general learning abilities.

We are pleased to be able to offer our CoBi+ support system to schools in and around the Frankfurt area for the 2022/23 school year.

Project management: Prof. Dr. Andreas Frey, Dr. Christoph König

Project team members from the work unit: Diana Dusny

Duration: 01.08.2022 - 14.07.2023

The project is funded by the Hessian Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs within the framework of “Löwenstark der BildungsKICK”.

HIKOF-DL aims at supporting universities and companies to exploit the full potential of the rapidly growing data sets from online teaching due to the COVID-19 pandemic by means of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze and transform it into highly informative and competence-oriented feedback for students. For this purpose, well established open source software solutions from the international learning analytics community as well as the KAT-HS assessment software developed in the KAT-HS project (funded by the BMBF) will be further developed into an open source tool for highly informative and competence-oriented formative as well as summative feedback. The feedback system will be implemented at Goethe University and evaluated in one of the university's largest lectures with about 1000 students. The project is carried out in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education and "studiumdigitale". The project is funded by the Distr@l funding program of the Government of the Federal State of Hessen.

Project management: Prof. Dr. Andreas Frey

Project team members from the work unit: Aron Fink

Duration: 05.2021 – 2024

Cooperating Partners:

Prof. Dr. Hendrik Drachsler, Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education

Prof. Dr. Alexander Tillmann, Goethe University Frankfurt

The CoBi project (identifying and reducing Corona-related educational disadvantages) aims to identify pupils who are notably affected in their learning by school closures and wants to provide them with psychological counselling. This is realized through the “MainKind” consultancy. In addition to learning problems, the social-emotional stress is also examined.

Guided interviews with the help of school psychologists point out which groups of pupils are particularly at risk and where their problems are.

Based on this, a computer-based online screening tool for the identification of these notably pupils at risk is arranged. This is used to determine whether a learner is at risk of failing to complete school and which problem area is dealt with.

The results of the screening are then used to help pupils at risk to learn more effectively using their individual resources as part of an individual psychological counselling service.

The CoBi support system – consisting of an online screening tool and individual psychological counselling – is evaluated based on an experimental approach. Provided that it is effective, an explicit objective of the project is to widely spread the support system so that as many young people as possible can effectively be supported.

The project is supported by the “Competence Center School Psychology Hessen”.

Project management: Prof. Dr. Andreas Frey, Dr. Thomas Dreisörner, Dr. Christoph König

Project team members from the work unit: Marion Schneckenbühl

The project is promoted by the Beisheim Foundation and the Goethe Corona Fund.

The Progress in Reading Literacy Study (German: Internationale Grundschul-Lese-Untersuchung [IGLU]) 2021 provides internationally comparative data on how well children read by assessing students’ reading achievement at the fourth grade. In Germany, approximately 4,000 students, their parents, teachers, and school principals provide considerable background information on how the German education system provides educational opportunities to their students, as well as the factors that influence how students use these opportunities. PIRLS has been a central element of the German national educational monitoring since 2001; PIRLS 2021 will be the fifth cycle in the PIRLS framework. Its focus is on reading achievement and its relationship with characteristics of the students (e.g., motivation to read), their instruction (e.g., instructional strategies for reading), their schools (e.g., school climate and resources), and their families (e.g., the home environment for reading). Trend results across assessments permit countries to monitor the effectiveness of their educational systems in a global context.  

In Germany, the Progress in Reading Literacy Study will be conducted in a consortium of a number of researchers from different scientific disciplines (Educational Science, Psychology, Didactics). The focus is on an interdisciplinary approach in close cooperation with international partners. The national scientific consortium consists of Prof. Dr. Nele McElvany (Institute for Research on School Development, TU Dortmund) as National Research Coordinator, Prof. Dr. Andreas Frey, Prof. Dr. Frank Goldhammer, Prof. Dr. Anita Schilcher, and Prof. Dr. Tobias Stubbe. 

Cooperating Partners:

Prof. Dr. Nele McElvany, TU Dortmund

Dr. Franziska Schwabe, TU Dortmund

Prof. Dr. Frank Goldhammer, DIPF Frankfurt (Main)

Prof. Dr. Anita Schilcher, University of Regensburg

Prof. Dr. Tobias Stubbe, Georg August University Göttingen

Duration: 03.2019 – 03.2023

Further information is available here.

Outcome-Indicator-Test for Education for Sustainable Development (OIT-BNE)

The OIT-BNE (Outcome-Indicator-Test for Education for Sustainable Development) project aims to achieve a cross-disciplinary modelling of competencies which will evaluate the results of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)-methods on an empirical basis. The question concerning the effects on learners which are mirrored in their competencies will be explored. This research project's goal is to develop an ESD-Outcome-Indicator-Set - firstly applicable to the school environment - which can be used to assess the success of competence-building.

The project is being worked on at various locations: Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Ludwigsburg University of Education and Ackerdemia e.V. (Berlin). AF supports the project as a partner. As a partner, the work unit Educational Psychology with focus on Counselling, Measurement, and Evaluation from the Goethe University Frankfurt supports the project team with data analyses, providing expertise for the development of an adaptive test, adapting adaptive test software of our department to the project context and integrating the continuous calibration strategy proposed by Fink, Born, Spoden and Frey (2018).

Project team members from the work unit: Prof. Dr. Andreas Frey, Patrick Naumann, Aron Fink

For further information please visit this information page from the University Magdeburg or the homepage of the OIT-BNE project.