Research

Bavarian Reading Screening (BYLES)

The results of the IQB Education Trend (2021) show that a significant number of primary school students fail to meet the minimum standards in German and Mathematics. The Standing Scientific Commission of the Conference of Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs (SWK) concludes that these students are unable to successfully complete educational processes due to a lack of basic competencies. In their expert report "Conveying Basic Competencies - Securing Educational Opportunities" (2022), the SWK therefore points out the necessity of a concept for the systematic diagnosis and promotion of basic competencies in primary schools.

Following this recommendation, the Educational Data Science (Prof. Dr. Sven Hilbert) and German Didactics (Prof. Dr. Anita Schilcher) chairs at the University of Regensburg are developing a standardized digital, adaptive reading test for primary schools on behalf of the Bavarian State Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs (StMUK) as part of the BYLES project. This initially comprises three modules:

• Reading Fluency: This test measures how well and quickly children can decode words or sentences.
• Reading Comprehension: This test requires students to understand the content of an age-appropriate text and answer questions about it.
• Digital Reading: This test examines how well children can navigate digital texts, link information, and evaluate it.

The modules are conducted in an adaptive format. This means that the task difficulty is adjusted to the individual performance of the students. This ensures that all children, regardless of their prior knowledge, are adequately tested.

Thus, the test represents an important step towards improving the diagnosis and promotion of basic competencies in primary schools. The test is scientifically based and provides teachers with a valid and reliable assessment of their students' reading competencies.

Contact person:

• Dr. Mario Frei (Educational Data Science)

Project directors:

• Prof. Dr. Anita Schilcher (Didactics of German Language and Literature)
• Prof. Dr. Sven Hilbert (Educational Data Science)
• Dr. Johannes Wild (DDidactics of German Language and Literature)

Software development:

• Stefan Böhringer
• Charles Grigull
• Roman Hochhalter

Additional partners:

• XDEV Software
• pegasus IT
• Sarah Hoppenkamps (Graphics and animations)

Subject-Specific Teacher Competencies - Predictive Validation of Professional Knowledge Tests for Teachers in Six School Subjects

The interdisciplinary research group FALKO-PV (Fachspezifische Lehrkraftkompetenzen – Prädiktive Validierung / Subject-Specific Teacher Competencies - Predictive Validation) investigates the predictive validity of domain-specific professional knowledge tests in six different school subjects (German, English, Protestant Religion, Latin, Mathematics, Music). These tests were constructed in the FALKO project (Krauss et al. 2017) to assess the content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge of secondary school teachers. The validation targets are the three basic dimensions of teaching quality (classroom management, constructive support, cognitive activation) as well as subject-specific characteristics and the (potentially mediated) student learning success. Using a uniform conceptualization and a design common to all disciplines, the generalizability of the three generic aspects of teaching quality and their necessary extension by domain-related criteria, as well as the chain of effects from teacher competence to student performance, are empirically tested - for four subjects for the first time.

Contact person: Dr. Alfred Lindl

Current and further information about the project can be found here.

The FALKO-PV junior research group is funded within the framework program of Empirical Educational Research by Bundesministeriums für Bildung und Forschung (Federal Ministry of Education and Research).

PETRA 2.0 - Personalized Therapy for Rheumatoid Arthritis (PETRA 2.0) based on the Psychoneuroimmunology Model

The project aims to improve health-promoting behavior in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, strengthen their life and health competence, and thereby positively influence immunology and disease progression. Those affected should learn to self-determinedly manage the feelings associated with their illness - e.g., fear, anger, depression, doubt, and weariness - in their daily life and work environment. For this purpose, a nine-month intervention program with a sustainability phase was designed. Based on psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), a total of twelve intervention modules were developed, focusing on different aspects of daily life, including how patients deal with stress and emotions. The training strengthens the emotional and social competencies of the participants and develops problem-solving strategies. From a psychoneuroimmunological perspective, this should positively influence immune disorders and disease activity in the long term.

You can find further project information here.

Information for interested patients can be found here.

Contact persons within the professorship:

Sven Hilbert

Miriam Schirmer

Stefan Böhringer

Regensburg Voice Training: A Prevention Project on Mindfulness and Voice for Staff at Bavarian State Schools

Teachers face high demands on their vocal and speech apparatus. Unlike other professional groups (actors, singers), teachers in Bavaria are not prepared for their voice and speech-intensive profession. As a result, the prevalence of voice disorders in the professional group of teachers is significantly higher compared to non-teachers. Consequently, special importance should be placed on the prevention of voice disorders for state school personnel in Bavaria.

At the University of Regensburg, an app is being developed and evaluated through inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration. This app offers teachers self-reflection and training opportunities in the areas of body and posture, breathing, phonation, articulation, and voice hygiene.

You can find more information here.

Contact person:Jonas Hauck

WRITE is a program that supports young early-career researchers in the publication process. Interdisciplinary teams work on a joint English-language article over the course of a year and are guided by an expert until publication.

More information about WRITE can be found here.

PETRA (Personalized Therapy for Rheumatoid Arthritis)

The project is aimed at patients (Pts) with RA who want to change their behavior in a health-promoting way and actively improve their life and health competence. PETRA is intended to help them manage the feelings associated with their illness - such as fear, anger, depression, doubt, and weariness - in their daily life and work environment in a health-promoting and self-determined manner. A nine-month intervention program with a sustainability phase aims to strengthen the emotional and social competencies of the participants and improve their problem-solving skills.

Information about the PETRA project

Contact person within the working group:

• Stefan Coors
• Prof. Sven Hilbert

FALKE (Subject-Specific Teacher Competencies in Explaining)

Although the competence of explaining is commonly seen as central to successful teaching, it is largely absent from the subject-specific didactic literature of various school subjects and has so far hardly been the subject of systematic university teaching offerings.

The aim of FALKE is to conduct in-depth empirical investigations of the construct of explaining in various school subjects and to specifically improve the explaining competencies of teacher trainees in specially designed seminars.

Information about the FALKE project

Contact person within the working group:

• Dr. Alfred Lindl
• Mario Frei
• Prof. Sven Hilbert

FALKO-Latin

Based on the theoretical conceptualization following Shulman's taxonomy of knowledge and its modeling in the COACTIV study, the FALKO-Latin project, which is part of the interdisciplinary research group FALKO (Subject-Specific Teacher Competencies), developed and validated a test instrument for assessing the content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge of (prospective) teachers through domain-specific operationalization. The comprehensive main sample of teacher trainees and teachers collected with this instrument provides, for the first time, empirical insights into the acquisition process and the structure of Latin-specific professional knowledge and can offer indications for long-term optimization possibilities of subject-related learning opportunities during the different phases of teacher training. Numerous central results have already been published in a project-specific anthology and in further articles.

Contact person within the working group

• Dr. Alfred Lindl

in cooperation with

• Harald Kloiber

ADELE (Adaptive Digital Assessment of Reading Competence):

The ADELE project aims to develop a digital reading comprehension test that takes into account the difficulty of tasks, the difficulty of texts, as well as the performance level of students. (commissioned by Klett/Jungösterreich)

Subject-Integrating Reading Promotion Bavaria (FiLBY)

The goals of the project are the development and testing of instruments for the systematic diagnosis and promotion of reading competence (reading fluency and reading strategy training FiLBY) for use in Bavarian primary schools starting from the 2018/2019 school year by the Chair of Didactics of German Language and Literature at the University of Regensburg, scientific accompanying research on the question of the sustainability of the instruments, as well as the development of an e-tutorial for primary school teachers on the use of FiLBY in the classroom in grades 2 to 4.

Contact persons within the working group:

• Laura Simböck
• Prof. Sven Hilbert

in cooperation with

• Dr. Johannes Wild
• Prof. Anita Schilcher

Under the guideline of designing teacher education cooperatively and with a reflected theory-practice relationship, KOLEG2 aims to develop Regensburg into a place of future-oriented teacher training from a single source. Crucial for a sustainable innovation boost are intensive networking with partners in the educational landscape, close transdisciplinary cooperation, and jointly shared responsibility within the university.

Information about the KOLEG 2 project

Contact persons within the professorship: 

• Maria Gürtner
• Lena Schiestel

FALKE 2 (Subject-Specific Teacher Competencies in Explaining)

Information about the FALKE 2 measure

Contact persons within the working group:

• Prof. Sven Hilbert
• Jonas Hauck

L-Dur (Digital Teacher Education at the University of Regensburg):

L-DUR brings a digital note to teacher education. The project addresses the focus areas of "theory-practice linkage" and "learning contexts in teacher education" and creates a digital platform for cooperation and collaboration between university and school.

Through location- and time-independent collaboration between schools and university, teachers and students, as well as educational scientists, L-DUR creates a new key in teacher education. Until autumn 2023, five measures are working in cooperation with project staff with an IT background on concepts for teacher training in the area of digitalization.

Information about the L-DUR project

Contact persons within the working group:

• Prof. Sven Hilbert
• Xuefeng Hao

FALKE-digital (Subject-Specific Teacher Competencies in Explaining): Professional Explaining Competence E-Learning

FALKE-digital focuses on the production and effectiveness of explanatory videos and thus aims to advance the promotion and investigation of digital professionalization processes.

Although students are already using digital offerings such as explanatory videos on online platforms in large numbers for independent learning, very little is known about the effectiveness of explanatory videos in the school context. Also, little is known about the factors that enable effective teaching and learning with explanatory videos.

Information about the FALKE-digital measure

Contact persons within the working group:

• Mario Frei
• Prof. Sven Hilbert

L-DUR: SSE (Learning Written Language Acquisition Didactics Optimized and Efficiently):

The SSE measure tests and evaluates a digital diagnosis-support tool for adaptive design of learning processes in collaboration with all three phases of teacher education. The tool captures the individual (orthographic) writing development and learning behavior of primary school students. Machine Learning algorithms align writing (sub-)performances and learning-related influencing factors such as motivation, cognitive activation, and time-on-task as a basis for a (partially) automated task selection and sequencing. During the testing and evaluation phases, students, trainee teachers, and teachers are involved in a participatory-symbiotic bottom-up strategy by using the tool, observing students' developments based on data, supervising the machine classification of spelling errors and learning behavior, and evaluating machine-generated support recommendations as experts.

LatEYEn: Eye-tracking Study on Perception Processes and Strategy Application in Translation-Oriented Reading

Although translation is one of the main activities in ancient language instruction and often presents great challenges for students, there has been little subject-specific didactic research on this topic so far. This interdisciplinary cooperation addresses this desideratum and, for the first time, uses eye-tracking to investigate unconscious perception patterns and cognitive strategies during the de- and recoding process from Latin to German against the theoretical background of the expert-novice paradigm, also considering these in connection with unsuccessful and successful translation performances. Findings are expected for expertise research in the field of foreign languages as well as didactic indications and consequences for ancient language instruction.

Contact person within the professorship:

• Dr. Alfred Lindl

in cooperation with

• Dr. Helen Jossberger