On the road to fair opportunities in education

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Five minutes once a week – this is all the time teachers who work with the “Levumi” online platform have to invest. The tests developed by Markus Gebhardt and his team allow teachers to record what progress individual children are making in basic skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic. “The idea is to get away from one-off selection and snapshots, after which support ceases, in favor of recognizing the child’s learning development,” explains the educational researcher.

He recommends tests for all first- and second-graders – similar to the reading fluency test – in order to identify children who are struggling. For 80 percent of children, the test questions pose no difficulty, but the remainder risk falling into a downward spiral if they do not receive support from an early age: “They get stuck somewhere in the subject matter and then have difficulties engaging, because the differentiation in lessons is not broad enough for them. They don’t get positive feedback anymore, because they’re compared with the better performers in the classroom. This leads to exclusion, less participation, fewer friends, and, most of all, a lower self-image in relation to their abilities in math and German.”

Markus Gebhardt has been Chair of Special Education (Learning Difficulties including Inclusive Education) at LMU since August 2024. He is a former student of special education at LMU. As he “always wanted to delve deeper into research questions,” he took up a research fellowship at the University of Graz after completing the second phase of professional teacher training (Referendariat). Graz was a particular draw because in this region of Austria, 88 percent of children with special educational needs (SEN) are taught in inclusive classrooms. He received his doctorate with a dissertation on the development of academic performance and social participation in integrated classrooms. In this research, one question continually exercised him: “What success do people with special educational needs have? The other kids keep moving forward. But the child with special needs is just slower. He or she needs more help or a different categorization of competences.”

How to measure learning success

After completing his doctorate, Gebhardt became a research fellow in the Chair of Empirical Educational Research at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), where he researched the PISA student assessment program among other subjects, “investigating again why some children are left behind,” says Gebhardt. From his ongoing reflections on how to measure learning success and provide positive feedback, he started to develop a system for the diagnosis of learning paths in 2015. He continued to work on this project after his habilitation degree and appointment at TU Dortmund University, where he held the Chair of Development and Research of Inclusive Educational Processes between 2016 and 2020. Gebhardt took up the Chair of Pedagogy for People with Learning Difficulties including Inclusive Pedagogy at the University of Regensburg in 2020 and built up the SEN teacher training programs for the education of people with learning difficulties. At the same time, he further developed the diagnostic tools on levumi.de.

So many teachers have since adopted the Levumi tests that it necessitated a move to more powerful servers, and Gebhardt’s team is learning the flipside of this success: “We’re offering regular further training sessions and can scarcely keep up with demand.” While he still generally has to persuade people that the diagnosis of learning development is needed in schools in the first place – a process he likens to a hamster in its wheel – Gebhardt would really like to “clarify the questions that lie beyond, such as: How do we move didactics away from selection and toward support?” In his research, Markus Gebhard investigates how inclusive schooling can work best for all children. As befits a “strong open-access advocate,” he makes not only his results freely available to the public, but also his lecture notes.

Inclusive school classes or special needs schools

“When you follow the public debate, the discussion tends to focus on how to reduce the percentage of children with difficulties, which is currently at 20 percent. And initiatives can have success here, albeit not completely. But children who have real cognitive difficulties also need structured help. If we think of people with disabilities, the most important feedback for them is: What have I learned? Where have I improved? Our idea is to improve individual benchmarks, which leads to inclusive didactics.” Gebhardt also investigates where and how this works better: in inclusive school classes or in special needs schools? “Many people are calling for extra measures such as school psychologists and learning therapy to assist teachers. But this doesn’t work.” Rather than bringing specialists into schools, it is more a question of changing the educational approaches.

Markus Gebhardt has many colleagues at LMU with whom he can discuss his research questions. “I’m delighted to be back. The advantage of LMU is the wealth of excellent researchers here, many of them deeply engaged in educational psychology and learning research. And special-needs pedagogy is also well established and networked here.”

Since his time in Regensburg, Gebhardt has increasingly been investing time in science communication, so that parents, teachers, and political decision-makers come to hear about his results. “Educational research can offer many recommendations for action for political discussion. I’m not a decision-maker, but somebody who provides information so that inclusion can be objectively classified.” His desire to contribute to a “fairer educational system” motivates his research: “Research tells us that inclusion can have positive impacts, but that it’s currently not working positively in many places and can even lead to exclusion,” says Gebhardt. “On the other hand, inclusion is a human right and many people have more opportunities now than before.”

Gebhardt will shortly publish a simulation study in which he investigated what consequences it would have if the special needs school system in Bavaria were to be closed. His general position could not be clearer: “The idea that people with impairments can and should be exclusively kept together is completely outmoded and was never right in the first place.”

For more information about the work of Markus Gebhardt, see:

Online platform Levumi.de: The tests for learning path diagnostics are developed by members of Markus Gebhardt’s chair and offered in collaboration with the Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN) in Kiel. Designed for teachers in mainstream schools and SEN teachers, the materials are available free of charge – digitally or on paper.

Markus Gebhardt on Youtube: The LMU professor presents videos of his lectures and other content online.