28th-30th of March, 2012, in Jena, Germany

The 1st Jena Spring-School on Educational Measurement is hosted by the Department of Research Methods in Education at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena.

The goal of the Spring-School lies in providing researchers working in the field of educational measurement, psychology, and educational research in general with an opportunity to improve the methodological knowledge and skills required for conducting educational research at an international level.

Workshop Program

The intended audience for the workshops is English-speaking postgraduates (with or without a PhD) as well as professors. Six one-day workshops are being offered in two parallel tracks. One track is targeted at novices within the areas, the other more at researchers with some experience within the respective topic. All workshops will be held by distinguished measurement experts from Germany and the USA. All workshops provide a mixture of lectures and hands-on-exercises. The language of instruction is English. The maximum number of participants for each workshop is 35. Meals and refreshments are included in the workshop fees.

Motivation for setting up the Jena Spring-School

In recent years, the importance of Educational Measurement has grown substantially and still continous to grow. This is at least to some degree due to both the increasing number and also the increasing demands of international large-scale assessments like PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS. These assessments regularly bring up new methodological challenges. However, in order to conduct research in the field of Educational Measurement at an international level, methodological knowledge of and skills in areas like the Item-Response-Theory, statistical simulation studies, causality, and longitudinal analysis are indispensable. Unfortunately, these methodological aspects are rarely covered by the current university curricula in educational science and psychology - at least in Europe. Thus, the aim of the Spring-School is to close this gap by offering a range of appropriate high-quality workshops. Furthermore, Jena with its Friedrich-Schiller-University is a city with a long academic tradition situated in a nice landscape, offering good food and beer breweries, which is - from our point of view - worth a visit.

Cooperation

Associated training program of the DFG-Priority Programme "Competence Models for Assessing Individual Learning Outcomes and Evaluating Educational Processes"