The research project AFEL (Analytics for Everyday Learning) is funded by the EU research and innovation programme 'Horizon 2020' and aims at investigating the processes of learning and knowledge construction on the internet. Psychologists, psycholinguists, data scientists, and software engineers work together to develop tools to support these online learning processes.
Are individual biases mirrored in collaborative web contents? For instance, is the Ukraine presented in a systematically more favorable light than Russia in the Ukrainian Wikipedia article about the Crimean Crisis and is Russia favored in the Russian Wikipedia article about the Crimean Crisis? If biases such as this in-group bias are contained in online encyclopedias as well, these biases could shape the view of a broad audience.
Have you ever looked something up on Wikipedia? Or have you also contributed yourself to Wikipedia? Web 2.0 is changing processes of knowledge construction. The question is how knowledge develops on Wikipedia and how the individual Internet user influences the construction of knowledge in turn.
The LearnMap project evaluates existing empirical studies on the efficacy of digital teaching and learning at the university and maps national projects, products and concepts using digital media in higher education. For this, a framework model is being developed in order to evaluate existing teaching and learning arrangements from a learning science and psychological perspective, to assess their effectiveness and, on this basis, to foster the exchange between teachers and researchers.
In this project, we aim to provide a structured overview of the success factors of digital learning and teaching in higher education, which (1) enables comparing different solutions and thus, allows assessing new approaches and concepts; (2) promotes the application of tools and methods across universities, and makes recommendations for the didactic design of teaching and learning arrangements, and (3) allows to make statements on promising networking and promotion strategies in order to exploit synergy effects and implement innovative approaches effectively.
In this research project we examine how different forms of presenting factual information influence people’s knowledge about and attitudes toward foxes. In particular, the project deals with the impact of different forms of visual and textual representations. It examines whether emotionalization through visual methods has a similar effect as emotionalization mediated by textual representations.
Basic research on numerical cognition suggests that numbers are represented along a spatially oriented mental number line. This number line representation is crucial for complex arithmetic procedures as it is associated with children’s understanding of numerical magnitude. Additionally, recent research suggests that the development of the mental number line can be promoted by sensorimotor experiences in accordance with theories of embodied cognition. Accordingly, can children profit from embodied cognition when learning numerical competencies? Are sensorimotor experiences beneficial for learning more complex numerical and arithmetic concepts and procedures?
Patients and medically interested laypeople use online platforms to acquire knowledge about diseases and medical treatments. These online sources offer a broad range of information that differs in quality and comprehensiveness. A presentation format that is particularly suitable for representing the complexity of medical content are educational videos about medical interventions.
The design and use of technology as well as the promotion of digital literacy are central fields of action in the field of education. For this, the meta project Digi-EBF (Digitization of the Education Sector) supports projects of the BMBF funding line for “Digitization in Education” in the framework program “Empirical Educational Research”. The subproject of the IWM focuses on teacher education. Additionally, the online portal e-teaching.org serves as a platform.
The project is based on experimental research on the analysis of open digital higher education. The research questions are concerned in particular with the opening of medical teaching for further disciplines, the opening of pre-clinical teaching to practice, and the opening of teaching for the discourse of different professions.
Accompanying the practical training of physiotherapists at the vocational school ulmkolleg, an internet-based learning platform was designed and implemented in the clinical education period. This platform also represents the research environment of the project. The aim of this platform is to accompany and support the clinical training on patients and the learning process of the students. Furthermore, research questions in the field of collaborative knowledge construction and individual learning are investigated over the entire course of training.
The Internet has become indispensable when it comes to searching for information. Such an information search can be understood as a self-regulated learning process: Constructing knowledge while surfing the seemingly endless data stream is a challenging task. The SALIENT project contributes to a better understanding of search as learning and develops methods to support the acquisition of knowledge through the Internet with the help of ranking and retrieval algorithms.
The project Smart Teaching Baden-Wuerttemberg accompanies ten digitization projects at universities in Baden-Württemberg. It aims to support the sustainability of the projects and to gain insights into the factors of success and obstacles for projects in the field of digital innovations. For communicating reports and practical and scientific findings from the ten projects Smart Teaching BW works in close collaboration with the E-Learning-Information portal e-teaching.org of the IWM.
The project investigates integration processes of individuals who possess more than one social identity because they belong to several relevant groups. Social identities can be more or less integrated in the self-concept. The project investigates the impact of social identity integration on well-being, on the effects of stereotype threat, and on the perception and selection of information coming from diverse group-related domains.
The evolution of ubiquitous computing technologies made it possible to access information and work materials independently from time and space. Due to small mobile devices such as notebooks, smartphones, or tablets, and continuous interconnection with the workplace, work can be done anywhere and anytime – work became ubiquitous. Research already deals with consequences of modern, flexible work forms like ubiquitous working (UW) regarding social or health aspects but there is little research regarding impacts of location-independent UW on other psychological variables such as work performance and cognitive functioning.
In this project we investigate the potential of touch-based technology (e.g., tablets, smart phones) to affect our thoughts and preferences. More specifically, we investigate how the success in learning domains as well as social integration into new groups can be affected by touch-based interaction with symbolic representations of the domain / group.
Whether it is record disks, pay back points, or garden gnoms: More than 50% of the citizens in Germany collect something. In so-called Citizen Science projects, citizens are increasingly collecting data about e.g. wildlife animals or bats. Yet, little is known so far about the success factors of these projects. Therefore, the aim of the WTimpact project is to investigate how to optimally design Citizen Science projects.
