An award-winning project from the IPN: FORMAT project awarded a Norddeutscher Wissenschaftspreis 2024

Project team FORMAT: Ronja Schiller, Lucas W. Liebenow, Prof. Dr. Johanna Fleckenstein, Dr. Fabian T. C. Schmidt, Dr. Jennifer Meyer.
Project team FORMAT: Ronja Schiller, Lucas W. Liebenow, Prof. Dr. Johanna Fleckenstein, Dr. Fabian T. C. Schmidt, Dr. Jennifer Meyer.

Ever since 2012, the science and research ministries of the German states of Lower Saxony, Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Schleswig-Holstein have been awarding the Norddeutscher Wissenschaftspreis to research endeavors in which different states collaborate. The award, worth a monetary prize of 250,000 €, goes to projects in regularly changing focal disciplines; this year’s focus was humanities and social sciences. The award ceremony, held on December 4 in Hannover, saw three outstanding projects share the first prize and a fourth, also selected for the final round by a panel of experts, receive an honorable mention.

One of this year’s award winners is FORMAT, a junior research group at the IPN that is investigating the potential for AI-assisted automated feedback to improve the attainment of learners in the school subjects of German and English. One of the key objectives of the research taking place in FORMAT is to enable larger numbers of learners to receive individualized feedback on written tasks and help teachers tailor their support for their students’ writing skills.

The FORMAT junior research group, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), has been working since October 2022, as a cooperative endeavor conducted by the University of Hildesheim and the Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN) in Kiel. The members of the research group, headed by Dr. Jennifer Meyer of the IPN, are Lucas Liebenow and Ronja Schiller, both working at the IPN, alongside the University of Hildesheim team, whose head is Prof. Dr. Johanna Fleckenstein.

«We’re delighted to have won this award, which emphasizes the significance of interdisciplinary collaboration and teamwork to scientific innovation and the relevance of our research. We’d like to express our especial thanks to all the schools involved in the project and our collaborators for all our great work together.»

Dr. Jennifer Meyer, head of the IPN’s FORMAT junior research group

Some moments from the awards ceremony

Foto von der Urkunde

And the other award winning-projects were

  • Transferpfade norddeutscher Universitäten in der biomedizinischen Forschung (T-NORTH – transfer pathways of North German universities in biomedical research) – Leibniz University Hannover
  • Forschungsnetzwerk Nord: Reproduktive Gerechtigkeit (ReproGerecht) (Northern Research Network: Reproductive Justice) – University of Rostock

An honorable mention went to: Entdeckung und Erforschung steinzeitlicher Großstrukturen am Grund der westlichen Ostsee (SEASCAPES – Discovery of and research into large Stone Age structures at the bottom of the western Baltic Sea) – University of Rostock

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