Project Konni
What is the project Konni?
German educational standards have repeatedly expressed the importance of including learning of social skills such as the ability to solve conflict productively, social sensitivity, communication skills etc. into the elementary schools’ curriculum.
According to several authors, different facets of social competence can be distinguished. Thus, there are skills dealing directly with behavioral components (interpersonal behavior and interactional skills) as well as components that deal more with the cognitive aspects (knowledge about rules of conduct). The fostering of social skills can be realized effectively in the school context. Therefore, it is not surprising to find a large variety of different offers for promoting social skills in schools. Until now, there have been only very few empirical studies concentrating on the analysis of individual strategies in the acquisition of social competencies within the framework of such offers. For this reason, the project Konni (learning and developing social skills) investigates the question how social competencies are acquired.
Objective and topics of the project Konni
The focus of the project is the question whether children who attend the third and fourth grades of German elementary schools make use of different learning strategies when acquiring social competencies.
The goal of the project is to develop a scale to assess the learning strategies of children in grades 3 and 4. Individual characteristics of the children (e.g. intelligence, motivation, social environment and gender) shall be considered additionally.
Research design and methods
In the context of the project Konni, a questionnaire shall be constructed with which the learning strategies of children while acquiring social competence can be determined. Before the end of this year, a first draft will be handed out to 3rd and 4th grade children who will be asked to fill it out. After analyzing the data, a final version of the questionnaire will be constructed. This final version will be validated afterwards. In addition to learning strategies, other characteristics will be included in order to determine influences on the use and the effectiveness of learning strategies when acquiring social competencies.
Milestones in the current year
Currently, the project is in its planning phase. Contacting schools in the federal state of Hessia has been started successfully. In the context of preparing the questionnaire, the existing research concerning learning strategies will be reviewed and included in the construction of the project’s questionnaire.
Additionally, we have started networking with other scientists who are active in this field of research.
Scientific coordinator
Dr. Mandy Grumm, Dipl.-Psych.
Sascha Hein, Dipl.-Päd.
