Faculty of Educational Sciences

Institute for Educational Science

The largest institute in the Faculty, the Institute for Educational Science provides scope for a broad spectrum of different research profiles and adopts various methodological approaches to research into education and schooling, which encompass historical, systematic, theoretical and empirical procedures for tackling problems in these two areas. Quantitative and qualitative research methods are applied alongside ideological, hermeneutic and humanities-based methodologies within the context of a critical social-sciences perspective. These various methodological approaches form the disciplinary core of modern educational science, particularly in respect of the reciprocal effects they display.

Three German Research Foundation (DFG) projects relating to school and teaching development were secured in 2015 and 2016. These were “Multilingual Orientation in the Teaching of French” (Prof. Kerstin Göbel, in cooperation with the University of Wuppertal), “Leadership and School Development in Context” (Klein) and “Configuration and Professional Use of Criterial Assessment Guidelines in Centralised Final Examinations” (Kühn).

One particular highlight of the Institute for Educational Science, and indeed for the University as a whole, was the success of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research proposal “ProViel. Professionalisation for Diversity. Dynamic. Flexible. Evidence-based” (director: Prof. Isabell van Ackeren), which formed part of the Federal Government-Federal States project “Quality Campaign for Teacher Training”. Members of the Institute are also involved as sub-project leaders (Prof. Clausen, Göbel, Pfaff, Tervooren) and in coordinating fields of activity (Pfaff). In addition to this, members of the institute are participating in four projects on the professionalisation of (trainee) teachers within the scope of the “Research Today – Teach Tomorrow” programme (funded by the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Research of the State of North-Rhine Westphalia) and are running two projects focusing on school education processes in socially-deprived contexts and on the related professionalisation and school development approaches for the promotion of educational justice (funded by the Mercator Foundation). At the end of 2016, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research funded a “Winter School – Interdisciplinarity in Qualitative Educational Research” (Tervooren, Bremer, Kessl, Richter, Rotter). The Institute is gaining a particular level of international visibility with its national leadership of the EU-funded “International Civic and Citizenship Education Study ICCS 2016” (Abs). In cooperation with the Faculty of Engineering, it is also involved in the international network “Centre of Excellence for Technology Education” (CETE, together with network partners from the Universities of Delft, Missouri, Luxembourg and Cambridge and the North Switzerland University of Applied Sciences (director: Mammes).

Finally, the members of the Institutes have also been concentrating on the long-term development of research structures at the University of Duisburg-Essen. They joined forces with the Centre for Empirical Educational Research (ZeB) and the Methods Centre for Qualitative Educational Research (MzQB) to transfer the University’s interdisciplinary research cluster of “Empirical Educational Research” into the new “Interdisciplinary Center for Educational Research” (IZfB). Jeannette Böhme, Hermann Josef Abs and Ingelore Mammes were all appointed as founding directors of this Center. Hermann Josef Abs was also elected as Founding Chair of the “Interdisciplinary Centre for Integration and Migration Research” (InZentIM).