The Promotion of Giftedness as a central event of school and classroom development is the central object of investigation for the research project Talent Promotion at the Saxon State Gymnasium St. Afra in Meissen. The state gymnasium created a new school program and wants these new developments to be accompanied by academic research. The project will last two years. The perspectives of students, teachers, pedagogical professionals at the boarding school, as well as school administration and legal guardians will be integrated in the study. The project funds were collected by the Research Group Study of Giftedness and Individual Promotion under the leadership of Christian Fischer. Carly Abbenhaus will handle mentoring issues, i.e., the close supervision of students. David Rott will tackle the more advanced aspects, such as changes to student timetables and the promotion of gifted students. After several preliminary discussions beginning last summer, an initial school visit took place in Meissen, during which the approach for the project phase was finalized. The results will be used for data-supported school and teaching development and will also be published in academic publications.
The journal School. Education. Inclusion – Journal for Qualification and Transformation (SBI) will be published by the IfE as an open access and double-blind peer reviewed online academic journal. The journal began as a further development of the QfL – Qualification for Inclusion and will be edited by a team consisting of the Research Group for Didactics and School Research in inclusive Education as well as Foundations of Inclusive Education and Special Education. The SBI sees itself as an interdisciplinary and multiparadigmatic medium which is open to all disciplines researching educational processes. Theoretical and empirical contributions of didactic, conceptional, theoretical, and methodological relevance will be published. The call for the first issue (January 2027) was recently posted and focuses on transformation. For more information, see here.
Laura McCullaugh (Research Group Research Methoods/Emprical Educational Research) succesfsully defended her PhD on February 5, 2026 and earned the grade summa cum laude. Her dissertation, “The Measurement of Student Engagement: A Critical Examination of Operational Definitions and the Development of German-Language Scale,” investigates the construct “Student Engagement,” which includes the cognitive, behavioral, and affective dimensions of classroom participation. Although this construct is quite common in the English-speaking world, the definitions and operationalization of Student Engagement prove controversial. In her dissertation, McCullagh analyzes the theoretical ambiguities which contribute to an inconsistent operationalization of this term and develops approaches to overcoming this dilemma. Based on a qualitative content analysis of English-language self-report scales, she developed a German-language measuring tool. Under the framework of a confirmatory factor analysis, the a priori postulated measuring model achieved good fit values. The results from measure invariance and item analyses, as well as an evaluative content analysis of cognitive interviews, confirm the validity of the scale’s construction and suitability for use with students between the 4th and 6th grades. The scale will be available for research purposes when the dissertation is published.
The Career Orientation Working Group, in cooperation with InterVal GmbH, has successfully secured funding for two research projects to evaluate the nationwide Career Orientation Program (BOP). Since 2008, the BOP has helped students recognize their strengths, explore career prospects, and further develop their career choice skills. The BOP is part of the Education Chains initiative and is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education, Family, Seniors, Women, and Youth (BMBFSFJ). The BOP is supervised by the Service Center for Career Orientation/Education Chains at the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB) in Bonn. The research contracts will be carried out in cooperation with InterVal GmbH (main contractor) and the University of Münster (subcontractor), represented by Prof. Dr. Katja Driesel-Lange. The Career Orientation Research Group contributes its expertise in instrument development and data analysis. The evaluation, which will run from September 2025 to December 2026, consists of two projects: The first research project examines the implementation and impact of potential analyses and career orientation days in accordance with the new quality standards of 2024. The second research project deals with the state-specific variants of BOP design and its structural parameters. To answer the research questions, a comprehensive mixed-methods design will be used, involving relevant stakeholders such as students, teachers, educational institutions, and responsible administrators.
The study’s goal is to formulate recommendations for the program’s further development. Further information on the project can be found here.
| From the Research Group Early Childhood Pedagogy
Markus Kluge (Research Group Early Childhood Pedagogy) was featured as an interviewee in the documentary “The Discovery of Childhood in Art (directed by Nicola Graef). Using portraits of children from major European museums, the documentary shows how views of children changed between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. It accompanies the exhibit “Kids! Between Representation and Reality” (November 28, 2025–April 6, 2026) at the Bucerius Kunst Forum in Hamburg. The documentary was broadcast on ARTE on December 14, 2025, and can be viewed in the ARTE media library until March 13, 2026.
Prof. em. Dr. Marianne Krüger-Potratz passed away on January 18, 2026 in Berlin at the age of 82. In 1984, she received a professorship at the University of Münster. She taught and researched here until 2009 in the field of intercultural and international comparative education. She led the Research Cluster Intercultural Pedagogy from 1986 and coordinated the accompanying degree program. From 2007 to 2010, she led the University of Münster’s International Center for European Education with Prof. Dr. Siegfried Gehrmann. Marianne Krüger-Potratz was a cofounder of the comissson for intercultural education in the German Society for Educational Science (Deutschen Gesellschaft für Erziehungswissenschaft). She was one of the first in the educational science field to recognize and systematically investigate the importance of diversity in an immigration society for institutional educational and learning processes. At the same time, her historical research on education and school policies made it clear that the discussion of migration and diversity in institutional educational contexts has a long history—despite the short history of the intercultural education discipline. Even after her retirement, Marianne Krüger-Potratz remained connected to her research topics, for example as a member of the editorial board of the journal Die Deutsche Schule, through active participation in academic conferences, and on the Council for Migration. Marianne Krüger-Potratz influenced both colleagues and students and inspired them with her topics. In her direct, friendly, and humorous way, she always treated her students with respect and appreciation. The Institute of Educational Science and the University of Münster will gratefully remember Marianne Krüger-Potratz as a dedicated and exceptionally warm-hearted university teacher.
The Assessment of Teachers in Preparatory Service is the subject of Christoph Kruse's dissertation (Research Group Didactics and Classroom Research) which has now been published in the “Rekonstruktive Bildungsforschung” series by Springer. In his study, Christoph Kruse uses written reports from teacher training as previously unexplored data material and asks how and with which criteria subject and school administrators assess the (lack of) success of teachers in preparatory service. Embedded in the context of professional research, insights into assessment practices in preparatory service and the relevant expectations, evaluation, and legitimation patterns are generated using (constructivist) grounded theory methodology. The study shows how the interweaving of these phenomena serves to transform the assessment of contingent situations into a clear and justifiable assessment of individuals. Expectations regarding lesson planning, interaction, and debriefing are identified as decisive factors for success. Based on this, problematic aspects of assessment—such as the “teacher’s personality” or the idea of the controllability of student behavior—can be explained as functional for the legitimization of the evaluation of trainee teachers. Expert opinions provide research-based insights into preparatory service that go beyond assessment practice.
Kruse, Chr. (2026). Die Beurteilung von Lehrer*innen im Vorbereitungsdienst (Rekonstruktive Bildungsforschung, Bd. 53). Springer VS. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-50449-6
In a competitive process, the Vocational Education Research Group was able to secure funding for a new third-party funded project on about learning location cooperation in nursing education. This project will be financed by the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB) over a period of three and a half years. Due to many unanswered questions on this topic, the project is starting with a hypothesis-generating approach. This will be followed by a nationwide survey in which the developed hypotheses will be tested. The findings will result in an online training series as well as recommendations and tools for practical application. In contrast to previous approaches to learning location cooperation, one focus is on the use of hybrid spaces and the associated boundary objects. The knowledge bases of different learning locations should be brought together in hybrid spaces in order to enable targeted boundary crossing. Hierin lies the genuine potential for innovative learning location cooperation.
| From the Research Group Foundations of Inclusive and Special Education
Over the past three decades, inclusive education has evolved into a global paradigm embedded in the policies of international organizations and reflected in major agreements such as the Salamanca Statement, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), or the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While aiming to combat discrimination, marginalization, and foster participation for all, inclusive education faces increasing political resistance and varying interpretations across cultural and national contexts. This diversity of interpretations has rendered inclusive education a fuzzy concept, posing significant challenges to international comparative educational research.
This special issue of the European Journal for Inclusive Education focuses on some of these challenges. The contributions grabble with the question of how such research projects can be appropriately conducted. The volume originated within the German Research Foundation (DFG) network “Inclusive Education in International Comparison” and is edited by Raphael Zahnd, Julia Gasterstädt (the Research Group Foundations of Inclusive and Special Education), Andreas Köpfer, and Lea Schäfer.
