Director Emeritus Jürgen Baumert
Emeritus Research Group of Jürgen Baumert
Schooling and Individual Development in Adolescence and Adulthood (BIJU)
Bilingual Alphabetization in Multicultural Societies: Evaluation of Berlin’s State Europe Schools (EUROPA Study)
Secondary Analyses of Staring Cohort 4 of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS-SC4), the BERLIN-Study, and the BIKS-Study
Emeritus Research Group of Jürgen Baumert
Jürgen Baumert’s work focuses on learning and instruction, schooling and the life course, bilingual education in multicultural societies, and academic and psychosocial adjustment of immigrant youth. These research projects are conducted in cooperation with the German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF; Kai Maaz and Marco Neumann), the Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education at Kiel University (IPN; Olaf Köller), Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (Jens Möller and Sandra Preusler), the Mercator Institute for Language Training and German as a Second Language at the University of Cologne (Michael Becker-Mrotzek), the Institute for Research on School Development at TU Dortmund (Michael Becker), the Institute for Educational Quality Improvement at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (IQB; Malte Jansen), Universität Hamburg (Jenny Wagner), and the LSA Psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Kai S. Cortina).
Schooling and Individual Development in Adolescence and Adulthood (BIJU)
The longitudinal BIJU Study Learning Processes, Educational and Occupational Careers, and Psychosocial Development in Adolescence and Adulthood was initiated in 1991. The BIJU sample of school classes comprises some 8,000 students from 212 secondary schools of all types in the states of Berlin, Mecklenburg-Vorpommen, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Saxony-Anhalt. The eighth wave of data collection took place in 2017, when most participants were 38 years old. The longitudinal study is being continued in cooperation with Universität Hamburg (Jenny Wagner, project director; Naemi Brandt), TU Dortmund (Michael Becker, project director), the IPN at Kiel University (Olaf Köller), and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (Kai S. Cortina). The study was funded by the Strategic Innovation Fund of the President of the Max Planck Society.
The BIJU Study’s five components are as follows:
(1) Providing institutional and individual baseline data on the integration of the East and West German educational systems and on the cohort born between 1979 and 1991.
(2) Analyzing domain-specific learning trajectories as a function of personal resources and institutional opportunity structures.
(3) Analyzing the transition from school to vocational training or university and to the labor market.
(4) Analyzing short- and long-term occupational career patterns as a function of social origin and education.
(5) Analyzing trajectories of psychosocial development (including political engagement) from a life course perspective.
Data collection began with a survey of the main cohort in the 1991/92 school year, during which data were gathered from seventh-grade students at three measurement points. The first point of measurement coincided with the transformation of the unitary school system of the former East Germany to the tracked system adopted from West Germany. The fourth wave of data collection was conducted in spring 1995, when the main cohort students were in the final grade of lower secondary school; the fifth wave in spring 1997, when they were either in vocational or upper secondary education; the sixth wave in 2001, after the transition from school to university or from vocational education to the labor market. The seventh wave in 2009/10 focused on occupational position and partnership; the eighth in 2017 on occupational careers, family life, well-being, and social and cultural integration.
Bilingual Alphabetization in Multicultural Societies: Evaluation of Berlin’s State Europe Schools (EUROPA Study)
The key objective of the EUROPA Study, which was initiated in 2013, is to examine whether bilingual alphabetization in two-way immersion is a suitable instrument for reducing the educational disadvantage of immigrant children. Drawing on a longitudinal, extended evaluation of Berlin’s State Europe Schools (SESBs), we aim to derive benchmarks for the outcomes of two-way immersion for children from German-speaking and non-German-speaking families. In addition, we test the hypotheses that (a) positive transfer occurs from the first to the second language providing that a critical threshold of language proficiency has been reached, and (b) children who learn to read and write in two languages are at a general advantage in terms of the development of executive functions. The quasi-experimental study includes a longitudinal component at elementary school level (see Figure 2), and is conducted in cooperation with the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (Jens Möller), the Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN) in Kiel (Olaf Köller), and the Mercator Institute for Language Training and German as a Second Language at the University of Cologne (Michael Becker-Mrotzek). It is funded by the state of Berlin and the Mercator Stiftung.
Berlin’s State Europe Schools (SESBs) implement two-way immersion with the aim of developing students as balanced bilinguals. The key objective is for students to become competent in German and a partner language without adverse effects on their achievement in other subjects. There are currently nine language programs at different sites: Students are taught in German and either English, French, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, or Turkish. The languages have equal standing; half of the subjects are taught in German, the other half in the partner language.
Findings showed that, at both elementary and lower secondary level, the performance of SESB students in reading comprehension, mathematics, and science was neither higher nor lower than that of their peers in comparison groups drawn from monolingual schools in Berlin when testing was conducted in German. In other words, although they had learned to read and write in two languages and had been taught in both of those languages, the SESB students showed no developmental disadvantages in subjects taught in German. These findings did not change when we controlled for the social, educational, and cognitive selectivity of the SESBs. Moreover, SESB students performed much better in English. Two-way immersion thus lays a solid basis for learning a further foreign language. However, there was no evidence that immigrant students receive more individualized instruction that caters to their specific needs.
Fourth- and ninth-grade students were also tested in the partner language, using reading comprehension and science tests from international studies. This approach made it possible to compare the achievement of the SESB sample with that of their peers in countries where the partner language is the language of instruction. At first glance, the analyses confirmed that fourth-grade students have not yet reached the achievement level of L1 speakers from the partner countries in reading comprehension in the partner language. However, a good two-thirds of them have a solid basic command of the language. In fact, almost half of them reached a level typical of that achieved in the partner countries. Similar patterns of results emerged for ninth-grade students at the end of lower secondary level.
Secondary Analyses of Staring Cohort 4 of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS-SC4), the BERLIN-Study, and the BIKS-Study
The analyses focus on the academic and psychosocial adjustment of adolescents and young adults with a migration background and the transition from elementary to secondary school. The analyses are conducted in cooperation with Cordula Artelt (University of Bamberg), Michael Becker (TU Dortmund), Kai Maaz and Marco Neumann (DIPF Frankfurt), Malte Jansen (IQB, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and Olaf Köller (IPN, Kiel University).