Diversity and inclusion as challenges for educational effectiveness and improvement
In the past decades, the claim that educational opportunities have to meet the learners’ diversity has significantly increased (e.g., regarding students with special educational needs or students with immigrant background). Teachers and other professionals in education are nowadays increasingly evaluated by whether and to what extent they meet the learners’ diverse needs and enable them to fully participate in the educational system. Confronted with these requirements, educational professionals are more and more taking into account the results of international empirical educational research in order to obtain evidence-based information on how to design and organise appropriate educational measures. However, the increased demand of fulfilling all learners’ needs also puts into question the validity of the scientific evidence. Against this background, many of the “classical” research questions have to be reconsidered, for example: How can appropriate measures of success for teaching and learning processes be adequately modelled in heterogeneous and diverse social and educational contexts? How should different and even contradictory educational target criteria (e.g., achievement versus social outcomes of education) be dealt with in such contexts? Which characteristics of the learning environment and which teaching and learning methods are most effective for different groups of learners as well as learners facing multiple educational disadvantages?
The aim of our conference is to discuss current high-quality research results and to address a multitude of these questions regarding educational effectiveness and improvement from an international, interdisciplinary and comparative perspective.