Connected research: “Important not to work at cross purposes”

Meta project in one of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research’s funding priorities connects researchers and pools results

Greater opportunities in education for people with a migrant background, in particular women and girls, and breaking down barriers to accessing education: these are the focal topics in the program “Integration through education” from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Included in the program is a project consisting of four sub-projects “Meta project migration, integration and participation in education” (MetaIntBil), that is receiving funding of approximately 1.5 million euros. Prof. Dr. Stephan Kröner and Dr. Lisa Birnbaum from the Chair of Empirical Educational Research at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) are focusing on the current state of research.

An interview with Stephan Kröner and Lisa Birnbaum

The BMBF is currently funding several projects on the topic of “integration through education”. Your project is part of what is referred to as the meta project. What does that mean?

Lisa Birnbaum: The BMBF is funding a total of 20 collaborative research projects focusing on integration through education. When so many different researchers work on related projects it is important that we don’t work at cross purposes. As a meta project, we are responsible for linking researchers with each other and pooling the results obtained in the various research projects, before correlating these results and incorporating them into the national and international state of research.

Stephan Kröner: We are not working alone, we are working together with our colleagues from the University of Bamberg, the University of Hamburg and our partner in the field, the charity Bildung & Begabung. We are also advised by the German Expert Council on Integration and Migration. All sub-projects included in the meta project are responsible for their own area of expertise.

What exactly are you responsible for in the project MetaIntBil?

Lisa Birnbaum: Our focus lies on research synthesis. Research synthesis provides a comprehensive overview of research in a certain area. In our case, it is an overview of international research on the topic of integration through education and on various focus areas included in this.

Stephan Kröner: It can be likened to an extensive database search. We search through subject-specific databases for certain keywords, for example a combination of “reading” and “migration background”. If you have ever tried that yourself, you will know that you can quickly pull up more than one thousand hits. It goes without saying that no-one can read that much literature, which is why the search is filtered further, running the risk of missing important articles. We are doing the exact opposite. We are deliberately running a very wide search, ending up with perhaps not 2,000 but 200,000 results. However, we do not view them all. Once we have these results, we subject them to what is known as priority screening. That is comparable to the system used by a search engine: the articles considered to potentially be the most relevant are sorted to the top of the list, and these are the ones whose content we check first. We then use what we learn from these articles to further refine the search. We keep doing that until we virtually run out of relevant articles. That is often the case after several thousand articles. Finally, the articles we find are grouped according to similar topics. In the end, we have a good overview of a broad research area, leading to what is known as a scoping review.

What happens with your results?

Stephan Kröner: In the first instance, our objective is the same as with all our research projects, in other words to publish the results in peer reviewed journals in order to make our research available as a basis for further research and future interventions. In addition, we will regularly share our interim findings with our colleagues and practitioners in the BMBF funding priority over the next three years.

Lisa Birnbaum: This funding priority focuses particularly on practical applications. All collaborative research projects funded by the BMBF have a practitioner they work closely together with who is not involved in research. In our case it is GmbH Bildung&Begabung, that is responsible within MetaIntBil for science communication and knowledge transfer.

Stephan Kröner: As well as the publications, all our results are publicly available, in accordance with data protection regulations. As advocates of open science, we make our data, evaluation methods and results publicly available without a pay wall in order to ensure that they are freely available for anyone who would like to work with them.

Further information:

Prof. Dr. Stephan Kröner
stephan.kroener@fau.de

Dr. Lisa Birnbaum
lisa.birnbaum@fau.de