Educational Sciences

In 2011 and 2012, the Institute of Psychology was characterized by strong research activities in diverse areas of psychology, with a special emphasis on educational themes. The main research of Professor Annette Boeger’s group is a study on prevention of student dropout from teacher training programmes, which is being conducted at the Universities of Duisburg-Essen, Cologne, and Aachen. Since 2012, Professor Annemarie Fritz-Stratmann (Educational Psychology) has been visiting professor at the Centre for Education Practice Research at the University of Johannesburg, to which Dr. Antje Ehlert and Petra Langhorst have been appointed senior research associates. Dr. David Tobinski attended the Summer School of Professor John R. Anderson at the CMU in Pittsburgh in 2012. The research group headed by Professor Detlev Leutner welcomed the extension of the DFG “Competence Models” Priority Programme 1293, which is coordinated by Professors Klieme and Leutner and in which the group have their own project on problem-solving competence. The same group also obtained approval of the BMBF collaborative projects “ProwiN-II-Videostudie” and “BilWiss-Beruf”. Professor Leutner’s membership of the DFG Senate was also extended in 2012 for three more years. Research in Professor Marcus Roth’s group focused on stress-moderating effects of sensation seeking as a personality trait in school pupils, and on the development and evaluation of a training programme on empathy in social professions. One main topic of research in Professor Gisela Steins’ group concerns the relevance of relationship quality in creating and structuring school settings. A current core theme is setting up successful concepts for teaching classroom management skills in teacher training (subprojects of the joint programme between the federal ­government and the states for better study conditions and a higher quality of academic teaching, 2011–2020). The research group headed by ­Professor Lisa von Stockhausen is involved in a research network funded by the European Union (Initial Training Network on Language, Cognition and Gender; www.itn-lcg.eu), which studies the representation of women and men in language and its effects on extralinguistic factors such as social and economic status. Within the framework of a project approved by the DFG in August 2011, Junior Professor Silja Bellingrath is exploring the regulation of the HPA axis and the immune system in different subtypes of depressive disorder, since there are indications that both clinical and physiological characteristics of depressive disorders under enduring stress (e.g., at the workplace) differ from other subtypes of depression. The institute is keen to maintain its strong research performance in the years to come and use it to benefit scientific development and teaching in the faculty’s main area of educational science.