Three working groups (professorships) of the department of Psychology at the School of School of Social Sciences represent the field of Education Sciences at the University of Mannheim. All three professors work intensively on different questions dealing with learning and teaching in different contexts (schools, higher education institutions).
Chair of Educational Psychology (Professor Stefan Münzer)
The chair of Psychology of Education works (inter alia) on research questions relating to learning and instructing, for example, when it comes to designing multimedia units of instruction.
Research questions:
- How can new media and digital tools support successful learning?
- How do we learn, in particular, when using visual and spatial representations?
- Are navigation systems causing us to lose our sense of orientation?
- What is difficult about reading music notes?
- How can we make better use of practical experiences to learn from them?
Chair of Educational Psychology (Professor Oliver Dickhäuser)
The Chair of Educational Psychology works, inter alia, on questions related to motivation, for example on the kind of goals people are working on.
Research questions:
- What motivates teachers?
- What are the goals of teachers?
- Is there a connection between the goals of teachers and the attitudes of pupils?
- Are future teachers influenced by information about a pupil’s origin (migration) when it comes to evaluating their performance?
- What should performance feedback look like in order to motivate pupils?
- How can a teacher motivate pupils to work hard to reach their goals?
Junior Professorship of Quality of Instruction in Heterogeneous Context (Professor Karina Karst)
The junior professor of Quality of Instruction in Heterogeneous Contexts works, for example, on research questions related to the consequences of performance differences in pupils and how teachers deal with these consequences.
Research questions:
- How can we improve the diagnostic competencies of teachers to allow for adaptive teaching and individual support?
- How does the language proficiency of pupils in the first year of the Gymnasium develop if different starting levels and languages of origin are taken into account?
- Can teachers support the language proficiency of pupils in their first year at the Gymnasium by using the cooperative method of reciprocal teaching?
Go to the website of the Chair of Quality of Instruction in Heterogeneous Contexts