Completed Research Projects

Prof. Dr. Hans Peter Kuhn and Marius Mähler (Department of Empirical Educational Research)

In times of global change, schools have the task of preparing children and young people for a future we do not yet know. In the last decade, the OECD, among others, has therefore been concerned with the question of which competencies will become important(er) in the future and how the well-being of society can be secured. In terms of the psychology of learning, we speak of "sustainable learning" when competencies and skills are (co-)acquired that can be used in the long term and transferred to a variety of contexts. This is in line with the broader educational understanding of all-day schools and the OECD's considerations on future competencies. Schools that aim at sustainable learning promote the self-activity ("agency") and the cooperation of the learners. School well-being and successful social relationships are prerequisites for sustainable learning. However, these issues have only recently received increased attention in German school research. The assumption that all-day schools have a special potential to support sustainable learning is supported by isolated (international) findings. However, there are also research gaps, especially with regard to the perspective of the children and adolescents themselves. The project aims to identify these gaps by summarizing the state of research and to show ways to close them by analyzing existing data and additional small (preliminary) studies.

The project focuses on the role of pedagogical relationships of teachers/educational staff and learners for sustainable learning in the context of classroom and all-day learning. In particular, autonomy support and trust as important features of relationship quality will be investigated in terms of their conditions, effects and interactions. The aim is to answer the question of how pedagogical relationships in the classroom and all-day school must be designed from the perspective of children and adolescents in order to support well-being and learning success, and which special potentials of all-day schools are revealed here.