Projects

Our aim is to investigate the developmental trajectories of cognitive and motor adaptation across childhood, adolescence, young adulthood and old age. We have developed a new task that has proven to be appropriate and sensitive for investigating developmental and individual differences within specific age groups. Our aim is to identify moderators, both cognitive and social, that may explain differences in cognitive and motor adaptability between individuals. This could improve our understanding of how to identify groups at risk of learning difficulties. The results of this study have the potential to motivate future research into interventions and prevention strategies aimed at facilitating the adaptation of individuals to their environment.

The project aims to develop a standardized achievement test for students in grades three to six, which can be used to assess specific competences and impairments in written expression.

The project UPWIND investigates associations of affective, motivational, and cognitive processes in students. It specifically targets differences between children that can inform easily implemented interventions that can be tailored to individual students.

This project investigates how preschool children cope with linguistic variation. The focus is on the acquisition of adjectives such as big, clean or yellow. The project thus contributes to the question of how children acquire the grammatical rules of their first language and the meaning of utterances when the linguistic input is ambiguous.

Visual perception in children is known to serve as an early indicator of learning and achievement disorders. The project ViWa focuses on the development of visual perception and its relationship to math precursor skills and social-emotional competencies in children aged four to ten years.

Vocabulary learning is easier when the learner is active, either by making a prediction about the possible translation of the foreign word, or by making gestures at the same time. The aim of this project was to investigate these learning activities in more detail and to look more closely at the effects of their interaction.

The sub-project of the second project phase (2025–2029) in the BiEn department at DIPF is dedicated to the effects of the early childhood support chain on the development of basic skills in reading, spelling and arithmetic over the course of the primary school years.

The project WoBi investigates how children with German as their second language (Age of Onset: 2–4 years and 6–7 years) acquire the typical stress patterns of German.

In the project WorlD, we examine the role working memory plays for learning to read, write and calculate in children with intellectual disabilities.

What does it mean to grow up in Germany? In order to answer this question children as agents of their own lives are asked qualitatively and quantitatively about the main topics of child well-being, child poverty, and justice, as well as flight and migration.