Professionalization of actors in educational fields

Teachers’ competencies in assessing, testing, and evaluating learning outcomes, learning materials, and student-teacher interactions

Teachers’ assessments are frequently influenced by the social background of students (socioeconomic status, migration status) and may thus be biased. This makes research on the cognitive processes which may cause erroneous assessments and evaluations particularly relevant. Assessment is understood as the result of a cognitive process including attention, storage, and retrieval of information about a student, and socioeconomic and migration status as social stereotypes which direct information processing toward selective attention to and retrieval of stereotypical information.

Our research field is concerned with the question of the prognostic validity of teachers' assessments, which has interested educational researchers since the 1920's, and the analysis of the cognitive processes underlying teachers’ assessments, which is experimental in nature. Moreover, we address the conceptualization and assessment of teacher training and the analysis of the interaction between teacher-students and trainers as well as the development of teachers' professional identity.