What factors influence success at school?

Enlarge

What makes learning successful? Katja Scharenberg investigates this question in a way that considers school as a social environment. “It’s not just about the academic performance of children and adolescents in the various subjects, but also about their social interactions and wellbeing,” says the LMU educationist.

Scharenberg has been Chair of Research in Education and Socialization at LMU since September 2023. One of her main research interests is inclusion and heterogeneity. How well do children with special educational needs do in inclusive classrooms? She considers this question as central to her research: “Partly because we’re still discussing what our approach to inclusion should be, what direction we should be moving in, and to what extent we’re fulfilling the task of teaching all children together according to general inclusive principles.”

One of the questions she has explored in her research are the changes that are brought about by inclusive education. “Children with special educational needs who are taught inclusively in mainstream schools benefit in terms of academic achievement compared to separate schooling in special-needs schools. As regards social participation in inclusive classrooms, however, the empirical research shows disadvantages. Children with special educational needs still experience greater social exclusion than other classmates. They are perceived by other children as less popular, they tend to be ignored and excluded more than their peers, and they are more frequently rejected as seatmates.”

Despite these difficulties, Scharenberg refuses to throw up her arms. She is currently investigating, for example, how teachers can be trained to recognize the social participation of children with special educational needs and promote the social cohesion of all children.

From sociology to pedagogy

The research topics pursued by the LMU professor reflect her personal academic journey: “I’m actually a sociologist,” says Scharenberg, who studied sociology at the University of Cologne and at the University College London. “I was interested in educational science from an early stage. My master thesis, for instance, was about the disadvantages faced by students with migration background. This involved empirical research based on data from the PISA study.”

Scharenberg began her academic career in 2007 at the Center for Research on Education and School Development (IFS) at TU Dortmund University. She completed her doctorate in educational science there in 2011 with an empirical thesis on achievement heterogeneity and skills development. Her dissertation, which was based on the school achievement study “Competencies and Attitudes of Students (KESS)”, analyzed whether children and adolescents make greater learning progress in homogeneous or heterogeneous classrooms.

“When I started my dissertation, I hadn’t considered this topic from an inclusion perspective. Yet, questions like these are more relevant than ever: considering the differences between children not only as regards academic achievement, but also in relation to their social and cultural background, their gender, and any special needs. All children are different,” says Scharenberg. The question of how this affects their learning shapes her research to this day.

After her doctorate, Scharenberg worked as a senior researcher at the University of Basel and University of Bern for three years, where she researched the transition from education to employment and adulthood. In 2015, she was appointed Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Education Weingarten. The following year, she took up an appointment to a tenure-track professorship for inclusion and heterogeneity at the University of Education Freiburg. In 2020, she obtained her habilitation degree at TU Dortmund University and received the Venia Legendi teaching license in educational science and empirical education research. From 2021 to 2023, she was Professor of Educational Sociology at the University of Education Freiburg, before taking up her appointment at LMU in 2023.

Looking at school from different perspectives

In addition to sociology and educational science, Scharenberg draws on approaches from psychology and special needs education to address her research questions. “I value interdisciplinarity very highly, including in the make-up of my team. This is a very productive component of my work, looking at a topic from different perspectives and learning that, depending on the perspective, you can ask different questions and arrive at different answers.”

In her research, Scharenberg also investigates the structure of the German school system, where students are divided into separate school tracks, and the associated challenges. “Various studies, including my own research, show that it does in fact matter quite a lot where children and adolescents learn – that is to say, what kind of school and which school track they attend. At the same time, it also matters who the children learn alongside – in other words, the composition of the student body.”

The LMU educationist plans to devote more of her energies going forward to pursuing her interest in education for sustainable development. She wants to investigate what skills students can acquire at school that will enable them to proactively forge a sustainable future on their own initiative, and what contribution schools can make.

Scharenberg describes her excitement at coming to LMU: “It is changing my perspective on teaching.” Whereas she was exclusively involved in teacher education in Freiburg, she now also supervises students in the educational science & pedagogy bachelor’s program and in the educational research & management master’s program. “The students in these courses have their sights set on other occupations. For my lectures and classes, the students are much more heterogeneous and international.” Katja Scharenberg embraces this challenge when planning and designing her lectures and seminars.