Welcome to the website of the research area Education and Psychology.

Key areas of our group’s current research include:

(1) Motivation and achievement: We study how students’ motivational and emotional characteristics (e.g., academic self-concept, interests) develop and shape differences in achievement and achievement-related choices. For instance, we are interested in how different students respond to challenging achievement situations and how motivation and achievement shape their educational and career choices. In addition, we develop and validate instruments to assess competencies reliably (e.g., digital and AI-related competencies).

(2) Educational trajectories and choices: A key question in this area is why students often make very different choices about their educational and career trajectories, even when their cognitive characteristics appear to be quite similar. Factors such as gender, students’ motivational-affective characteristics, the social environment, and the school context play an important role in explaining these differences, for instance, in STEM domains.

(3) The teaching profession: We examine what motivates and enables teachers—preservice or in-service—to design and implement high-quality instruction. Across different projects, we focus on the measurement and conceptualization of professional competences in the teaching profession (including international comparative research), analyze the foundations of pedagogical decision-making, and study conditions that support teachers’ occupational well-being.

(4) Teacher–student dynamics: We integrate student and teacher perspectives on classroom processes to identify discrepancies in how classroom experiences are perceived and to examine what these differences mean for teaching and learning. We ask how such discrepancies relate to instructional quality, motivation, and learning, including reciprocal links between classroom characteristics (e.g., heterogeneity) and teachers’ instructional practices.

Projects

• #Digitalkompetenz.nrw – The Digital Check for Higher Education Institutions
• BONNS – Bonn Study on Educational Trajectories in Higher Education
• COLD – Competencies of School Teachers and Adult Educators in Teaching German as a Second Language in Linguistically Diverse Classrooms
• OSA|NK – Online Self-Assessment of Sustainability Skills
• Test-M-I – Further Development and Test-Theoretical Foundation of the Studiport Mathematics Knowledge Test – Project I