Photos by Davide Faranda
Professorship for "Educational Science Methodology" at the Faculty of Cultural, Social and Educational Sciences at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Research and teaching profile of the professorship
At the Chair of Educational Methodology, we pursue the goal of further developing methodological and statistical-methodological approaches in educational research and applying them effectively in practice. In our understanding, empirical methods and statistical procedures primarily have a "serving" function for the empirical exploration and examination of educational science approaches as well as for the sustainable and evidence-orientated further development of educational quality in Germany and in an international context. The professorship's research is focussed on two subject areas: Validity theory and validation practice in the context of competence measurements as well as methodological-statistical foundations of impact, evaluation and implementation research in the field of education.
Methodologically, a "modern" and complex validation concept in the context of educational science will therefore be further formulated and empirically applied in our department. It is characterised by the fact that validity is not assigned as a quality criterion to the survey or measurement procedure itself, but rather to the associated interpretations of the measurement results, the plausibility of which can only be assessed in the given context of application.
In the course of new governance models in the education system, the generation of empirical evidence at the various levels of the education system as a whole is becoming increasingly important. Similar to approaches based on validity theory, the aim is to systematically combine statistical and methodological aspects with considerations of practical utility and to develop evaluation research models that do not fail in reality due to their chronic under-complexity. In addition, the interplay between top-down and bottom-up implementation processes is still poorly understood, especially when it comes to implementing innovations and reforms on a large scale (scaling-up). Research work in our department is intended to advance the modelling and valid empirical recording of implementation and scaling-up processes in this field, particularly in the areas of inclusion, integration of immigrants and teacher competencies.