Department of Educational Quality and Evaluation

The Department of Educational Quality and Evaluation focuses on analysing the quality and effectiveness of educational processes and educational institutions. It is particularly concerned with conceptualising, measuring and assessing educational quality, with an empirical analysis of educational institutional conditions and developing and evaluating measures for assuring and developing the quality of education.

The department conducts research in two priority areas:

• educational effectiveness and improvement
• educational measurement and assessment.

Research in the field of educational effectiveness and improvement focuses on general educational schools. The respective projects increasingly take developmental aspects into account, i.e. they inspect the change of schools over a period of time. Accordingly, surveys and (in some cases international) large scale assessments are supplemented with qualitative studies and longitudinal assessments that systematically evaluate the effectiveness of interventions. This domain of research is, for instance, represented by two junior professorships

• adaptive learning environments - Silke Hertel
• empirical educational research and educational improvement - Tobias Feldhoff

Competence models and assessment procedures need to be developed in order to empirically analyse different components of educational quality as well as student performance. Research in the priority area of educational measurement and assessment focuses on the development of psychometric models and measurement procedures for the appropriate assessment and description of selected competencies. Furthermore, this domain of research addresses the use and effects of different approaches to measuring competencies and their feedback to school educational processes of learning and instruction, as well as conducting research and development tasks in the field of technology-based assessment. Two professorships are particularly concerned with this research domain

• educational measurement - Johannes Hartig
• technology based assessment and instruction - Frank Goldhammer

This Department’s activities are highly relevant in practical terms as results and products are rendered available to the different participants in educational processes by different means. Moreover, comprehensive counselling services are offered to national and international educational research as well as to stakeholders in educational policy and practice.