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Teachers in Adult Education

Aim Background Approach Data collection and processing Project profile Project partners

Aim

The joint project "Teachers in Adult Education" (TAEPS: Teachers in Adult Education - A Panel Study) is dedicated to the professionalization and competence development of teachers in adult and further education (AFE). Over a period of initially five years, a comprehensive and sustainable data basis is to be created and made available for research with the help of a standardized survey including randomized field experiments.

Background

The staff in further education is the most important factor of professionalization in this educational sector. Here, too, the qualifications, professional skills and professional commitment of the teachers are of great importance for the design of the teaching-learning situation and the learning success. However, these interrelationships have hardly been investigated in the field of adult and further education. In the TAEPS project, both the causal factors and contextual conditions for the development of a professional activity as well as concrete interventions for the development and promotion of professional (sub-)competencies are to be identified and the strenght of their effects determined.

What professional qualifications do teachers in adult and further education have?
What influence do working and living conditions as well as income have on professional practice and professional competencies?
How do competencies affect employment and income opportunities in the partial labour market for further education?
On which topics and in which ways do teachers in adult and further education acquire additional knowledge and new competencies?

To answer these questions, a combined longitudinal design with standardized panel surveys and subsequently intervention studies will be implemented. The linking of the information obtained in this way enables the investigation of longer-term effects of competence development and professionalization on the employment and income opportunities of the teaching staff.

Approach

TAEPS combines a standardized panel survey with intervention studies to address different research subjects and interests. In the course of the standardized survey with three waves of data collection, those socio-economic, demographic, professional and job-specific characteristics as well as competencies are recorded on the basis of which occupational biographical changes can be examined. The focus is on the processes of positioning in the partial labour market for further education as well as questions on employment and income opportunities and their dependence on competence development and professionalism.

The intervention studies are based on theoretically founded and empirically proven AFE courses that allow teachers to promote specific facets of their professional competencies in AFE. They aim to identify and test concrete innovations to improve teachers' competencies. Primarily, the focus lies on such aspects that cannot be measured easily by using standardized surveys and self-assessments, but can only be operationalized via systematic treatments, test procedures, assessments and expert evaluations. Examples are didactic planning processes or competencies for course planning.

Data collection and processing

A total of approx. 8,000 target persons in approx. 1,000 further education institutions nationwide are to be selected for the panel survey using two-stage random sampling and motivated to participate in the study. The infas Institute for Applied Social Research (Bonn) is responsible for carrying out the fieldwork. The intervention studies take place after the first survey wave on the basis of subsamples of the panel sample. These additional studies are administered by the German Institute for Adult Education (DIE, Bonn).

The data from the panel survey are prepared and documented as Scientific Use Files (SUF) by the Research Data Center (RDC-LIfBi) in accordance with the FAIR principles. With the integration of the SUF into the data and services offered by the LIfBi, researchers are provided with permanent access to this dataset for content-related and methodological analyses.