University Judgments. Evaluating Students’ Performances in Engineering and History.

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Herbert Kalthoff
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 459030538

Universities, as organizations of the formal system of education, are focal points through which significant parts of adolescents, after completing secondary education, receive further training. In teaching their temporary members - students - specific stocks of knowledge, they rehearse specific disciplinary views, which are refined in seminars, expeditions, laboratory studies, and practical training. Those courses and stations within academic degrees stand for specific institutional categorizations of students through academic staff members. Thereby, professors or junior researchers do not only observe students’ methodical or linguistic capabilities of professional knowledge, but also how this knowledge is appraised and considered by students. The project departs by studying a complex and intermingled process of teaching, examining and evaluating and by highlighting the categorization and marking of students. In a contrastive design, it focusses empirically on judgement in history and engineering by enquiring analytically into the social, material and symbolic dimensions of teaching and evaluation in higher education. The research project apprehends these proceedings as specific forms of non-school evaluation, which both defuse and intensify evaluation as employed in schools.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants