Projects/participations of the FDZ
Current projects
- VerbundFDB
- The Reproducibility and Robustness of Secondary Analyses in Educational Research: The Role of Publication Bias and Researcher Degrees of Freedom
- The Stamp in guidance
Finished projects
Current projects
German Network for Educational Research Data (VerbundFDB)
In the German Network for Educational Research Data (VerbundFDB) relevant national institutions from the field of educational research and research data infrastructure work together to provide an attractive and high-quality range of research data for empirical educational research. In doing so, it is committed to the principles of Open Science. At the VerbundFDB, researchers have the opportunity to archive self-generated data and to find research data for subsequent use.
Since 2022, the VerbundFDB has been a permanently established infrastructure for educational research. The VerbundFDB coordination office is located at the DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Human Development and Educational Information and is thus financed by the federal and state governments. The basic services of the VerbundFDB financed through this are operated by the partner institutions GESIS, IQB, and DIPF. The Research Data Centre of the IQB, as a partner of the VerbundFDB, is particularly concerned with the archiving, documentation and visualisation of data from studies with competence measurements. In addition, a total of 13 institutions are involved in the extended partner network (e. g. FDZ-DZHW, FDZ-LIfBi, FDZ-Lex, Qualiservice).
The VerbundFDB contributes to exploiting the potential of research data generated in educational research as comprehensively as possible and to establishing a culture of data sharing. Educational researchers from all disciplines can access quality-assured research data in a user-friendly way and independent of location. While safeguarding ethical, data protection and copyright interests, this enables research approaches across disciplinary and national boundaries. New research potential is created through high-quality research data and new possibilities for linking research data from different sources.
As a central contact point for research data in educational research, the VerbundFDB offers the following services:
- Visibility and findability of research data: Research data from different data centres and repositories can be searched via the data search;
- Publication and preservation of quality-assured research data: Data holdings are archived and made accessible at a data centre that is suitable in terms of content and methodology, while adhering to ethical, data protection, copyright and documentary standards (data sharing);
- Training and advice on data management: Topics of research data management are prepared and discussed in on-site training courses, digital training and information offers as well as through handouts (managing data). Project-specific questions can be addressed in more depth in individual consultations.
VerbundFDB works in close partnership with KonsortSWD and sees itself as part of the National Research Data Infrastructure (nfdi).
Contact us:
Lisa Pegelow, Benjamin Becker, and Julia Künstler-Sment
The Stamp in guidance
The Standardised Data Management Plan for Educational Research (Stamp) provides researchers in educational research with a tool for planning, organising, implementing and documenting data management. According to its structure, the Stamp is intended for direct use by researchers or data managers in projects. It guides users through data management, from the project planning phase to making the data available for subsequent use by third parties in accordance with the FAIR Data Principles. The Stamp is divided into eight modules organised along different data management themes. Each module consists of a) a requirement for managing FAIR data in the context of the respective topic, b) checklists with concrete instructions for implementing the requirement, and c) support for implementation in the form of recommendations and case studies for individual data management measures. Since the Stamp covers a variety of different data types and project constellations, not all measures defined in it are relevant for all projects. Rather, the Stamp must first be adapted to the respective project and the data to be processed.
In order to better support researchers and data managers in the use of the Stamp, it is also important to make the Stamp usable for data management consulting. To this end, the present short project is to ascertain, in exchange with counsellors, to what extent the Stamp in its current form is suitable for use in counselling and how it can be used, given the respective institutional background of the counsellors. In a first step, two virtual workshops will be held with counsellors (5-10 persons each) in educational research and in the social sciences.
The aim of these workshops is not only to evaluate the usability of the Stamp in counselling, but also its integration into the respective institution-specific framework conditions, such as the consideration of institutional data policies, the obligation to obtain an ethical vote or institutional templates for informed consent. For example, the basic module and selected checklists of the Stamp will be used to discuss its suitability for counselling in the context of the respective institution. The focus will be on the structure and form of the stamp as a tool for counselling.
Against this background, participants will be recruited from the RatSWD and KonsortSWD at higher education institutions and non-university research institutions with institution-specific advisory services.
Based on the workshops, a report of the results will be produced, which will contain tips on the use of the Stamp in counselling and summarise recommendations for future further developments of the Stamp. The project thus takes a further step towards transferring the Stamp to other social science disciplines as well as towards its institutional integration beyond educational research. The Stamp will thus be further developed in a demand-oriented manner, its multidisciplinary use will be promoted and the Stamp will be further expanded as a standardised tool for data management. The project is thus compatible with other NFDI projects, such as Base4NFDI.
For further information: https://www.forschungsdaten-bildung.de/stamp-nutzen
Contact:
The Reproducibility and Robustness of Secondary Analyses in Educational Research: The Role of Publication Bias and Researcher Degrees of Freedom (META-REP-IQB)
The Priority Programme "META-REP: A Meta-scientific Programme to Analyse and Optimise Replicability in the Behavioural, Social, and Cognitive Sciences" (SPP 2317), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), will start in February 2022. The goal of this interdisciplinary project is to systematically investigate a) what replicability means and when a replication can be considered as successful, b) which factors influence replication success rates, and c) which measures can be used to increase replication success rates so that robust research results are obtained. The programme is coordinated by the LMU Munich. It is a meta-scientific research program that aims to foster networking and collaboration between different disciplines. A total of 15 projects from the fields of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, methodological research, communication sciences, economics, and educational research will be funded for three years each.
The subproject at the IQB's Research Data Centre (FDZ, Forschungsdatenzentrum), led by Dr. Malte Jansen and Dr. Aleksander Kocaj, addresses questions concerning the reproducibility and robustness of research results based on secondary analyses in empirical educational research (Funding period: 02/2022-01/2025; total funding: 231.578€). The project is based on applications for secondary data analyses at the FDZ at IQB. In these applications, researchers describe their central questions, hypotheses and their planned analytic approach. We will systematically compare these applications with publications resulting from the applications. In addition, we aim to reproduce the results for selected publications. The project at the FDZ of the IQB has four goals. First, we examine whether data applications that result in significant or hypothesis-confirming results are also more likely to be submitted for publication and published (publication bias). Second, we plan to develop an index that quantifies the similarity between data use applications and resulting publications to provide evidence of selective reporting. Third, we will test whether the results of selected applications that resulted from data usage applications be reproduced using the information provided in the manuscripts. This will take advantage of the fact that the underlying data are available at the FDZ at the IQB. Based on this, we will investigate how robust selected research results are with regard to alternative plausible analytic approaches (multiverse analysis) in the fourth step. Overall, the project aims at identifying sources of heterogeneity that may influence the replicability and reproducibility of research findings in empirical educational research.
For more information: https://www.psy.lmu.de/soz/meta-rep/index.html
Contact us:
Dr. Malte Jansen, Dr. Aleksander Kocaj, and Aishvarya Aravindan Rajagopal