Prof. Dr. Frank Reinhold, recipient of a scholarship from the Daimler and Benz Foundation, was appointed to a professorship for mathematics education at the University of Education Freiburg as of December 2021. He has been receiving support for his research project “frACTIONs: Motivated Action in Learning Fractions with Digital Tools” since 2021 as part of the scholarship program for junior professors and postdocs.

Evidence-based accompaniment of digitization in mathematics teaching

It is widely recognized that mathematics teaching supported by digital tools has a positive influence on learning success – although it is not the digital tools themselves that are of benefit to learning, but rather specific features implemented within them: The integrative use of various different representations and the possibility of independent exploration in simulations, along with adaptivity and individual feedback, can considerably improve the learning success of weaker pupils in particular. With research findings such as these, Reinhold is participating in the international discourse on digitization in mathematics education. In particular, he is addressing the hitherto largely unanswered question as to what mechanisms of action can explain the positive effect of such features of digital tools. He is thus working at the interface of research between content-related didactics and the psychology of didactic learning. On the one hand, he relies on well-established methods from the quantitative-empirical social sciences to map learning successes – and on the other hand, he combines these with innovative logfile data analysis motivated by content-related didactics to map the cognitive activities of individual pupils in the learning process. In the frACTIONs project, he is for example investigating the roles played in this context by motivation and interest.

The scholarship from the Daimler and Benz Foundation has been one of the milestones in his career to date, Reinhold says: “Thanks to this support, I had the necessary means available to continue my research independently at the ‘new location’ at an early stage following my doctorate. Looking back, I can say that it was the great flexibility granted by the Foundation in using its funding – also for purchasing hardware or for developing software – that made a significant contribution to the development of my projects.”