Can delinquency be predicted?

Quiz question: "With which band did the Canadian singer David Clayton-Thomas (* 1941) have the hit Spinning Wheel at the end of the 1960s? The name of the group goes back to a quote from Winston Churchill's inaugural speech as British Prime Minister." Since 2014, the German Quiz Association has been posting ten questions like this with subtle hints on its website every week for people to puzzle over and guess. "You often don't know the answer after the third question at the latest," says Prof. Dr. Ulrich Schroeders, who recently became a member of the association himself. Schroeders loves such tricky questions. In conversation in his office on Holländische Strasse, we quickly end up playing the online word puzzle game "Wordle", the logic board game "Mastermind", "Sudoku" and the quiz game "Trivial Pursuit". Schroeders has been Professor of Psychological Diagnostics since fall 2017. Prior to this, he was a junior professor for Empirical Educational Research in Bamberg and before that a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Quality Development in Education (IQB), which regularly measures pupils' academic skills in large-scale comparative educational studies.

From these positions, it is easy to see what Schroeder's research interests are. How can academic skills, factual knowledge or reasoning be measured as accurately, comprehensively and fairly as possible? What technical possibilities and Mathematics models can be used for this? He is interested in machine learning, learning algorithms and metaheuristics, for example the question of whether the foraging behavior of ants or bees can serve as a blueprint for improving psychological tests and questionnaires. Or which cognitive abilities are measured with board and strategy games.

In connection with playful performance measurement, the PINGUIN research project, which runs until late summer 2027 and is an acronym for "Potential identification in elementary school", should be mentioned. The PINGUIN project, which is being carried out in cooperation with the Hector Institute for Empirical Educational Research in Tübingen, among others, uses a tablet-based measuring instrument to assess the cognitive potential and learning starting points of pupils at the beginning of primary school in a playful yet objective way. The measuring instrument consists of four modules that record cognitive potential, linguistic performance and basic literacy and Mathematics skills. The Kassel site is primarily developing the last three modules on learning outcomes. PINGUIN is intended to help identify potential at an early stage in order to enable fair, evidence-based support.

In another research project, Schroeders and his team investigated the extent to which delinquent behavior in adolescence and criminal behavior in adulthood can be predicted. The focus was on the question of whether there are behavioral patterns or self-reported problems that can serve as a kind of early warning system. The data basis was a large-scale, population-representative US longitudinal study in which drug, property and violent offenses were recorded over a period of more than two decades. The results show that delinquent behavior in adolescence can be predicted comparatively well - particularly in the case of drug, violent and property crimes. In contrast, the predictive accuracy for criminal behavior in adulthood was significantly lower.

A key finding was that young people who attracted attention early on through delinquent behavior - in particular through drug use, school problems such as suspensions or expulsions as well as other rule violations - had an increased risk of appearing in criminal proceedings later as adults. Starting points for prevention can be derived from the findings. For example, school psychologists and school social workers as well as targeted anti-addiction and anti-violence programs could help to interrupt problematic developmental trajectories at an early stage. "With comparatively little effort," emphasizes Schroeders, "many children and young people at risk could be helped effectively."

This article appeared in the university magazine publik 2026/1. Text: Andreas Gebhardt