Starting Position

Transforming half-day schools into all-day schools (i.e. a form of extended education) is often seen as a way to address the challenges posed to the German education system, e.g. due to immigration. High expectations have been tied to the expansion of extended education in form of all-day schools, in particular the strengthening of educational success and social participation of socially and educationally disadvantaged students with a migration background. So far, these expectations have not yet been adequately met in Germany. In other countries, however, there are comparable high-quality offerings of extended education that have been shown to be effective. Therefore, the project aims to harness empirical findings and knowledge from other national contexts in order to better exploit the potential of all-day schools, especially in primary school, in Germany as well.

Research questions

The target group of the research project are socially and educationally disadvantaged students with migration background. The project aims to provide answers to the following questions, with a special focus on diminishing educational barriers and promoting social participation of this target group:

1. What features are characteristic of the current implementation of all-day primary schools in Germany?
2. What characteristics of primary all-day schools in Germany are adequate, insufficient or missing with regard to the expected outcomes for the target group according to (inter)national experts?
3. How do practitioners in Germany (educational administrators, school administrators and other responsible persons, teachers and other educational staff) assess the impulses gained from the (inter)national experts for the further development of all-day primary schools in Germany?
4. What concepts, strategies, and products can be transferred to the German context and initiated together with practitioners and transfer partners at various levels?

Phases and methods

Based on the research questions, the project is divided into four phases:

In the first phase, all-day primary schools in Germany are characterized with a special focus on the needs of the target group (Schüpbach, 2018). On this basis, international and national experts are going to be interviewed and evaluate the current implementation in Germany with regard to the conditions for success and the pedagogical quality features of the offerings for the target group. The expert interviews are to be analyzed using qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2014).

In the second phase, international experts receive a summary characterization of the offerings currently implemented in the German context for a second evaluation. Subsequently, national experts evaluate the perspective of the international experts. Thus, the evaluations of the (inter)national experts are analyzed in a sequential procedure.

In the third phase, results will be discussed in focus groups by different practitioners from the German all-day (primary) school context (Morgan, 1997). These discussions will also be assessed using qualitative content analysis.

The results obtained will be tested and evaluated in the fourth phase together with German practitioners and transfer partners. A final survey with schools and their cooperation partners aims to generate assessments of whether the concepts and measures developed are practicable and purposeful.

References

Mayring, P. (2014). Qualitative content analysis: theoretical foundation, basic procedures and software solution. SSOAR. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-395173.

Morgan, D. L. (1997). Focus groups as qualitative research (2nd. ed.). SAGE Publications, Inc.

Schuepbach, M. (2018). Useful terms in English for the field of extended education and a characterization of the field from a Swiss perspective. International Journal for Research on Extended Education, 6(2), 132–143.