BRIDGE | | PLATO Lab | New Edited Volume | Funding
We are pleased to share our PLATO highlights 2023 with you in our current Newsletter.
Obituary for David C. Berliner
On September 26, 2025, the field of educational research lost one of its most influential and distinguished voices: David C. Berliner passed away in the United States at the age of 87. His intellectual vision, critical acumen, and unwavering commitment to public education shaped educational research, practice, and policy for more than half a century. His passing represents a profound loss to the international educational research community.
David C. Berliner was Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Education at Arizona State University. Over the course of his distinguished career, he taught and conducted research at numerous renowned institutions, including the University of Arizona, the University of Massachusetts, Stanford University, and universities in Australia, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland. His scholarly reputation was matched by his international presence and influence.
David Berliner was elected to both the National Academy of Education and the International Academy of Education, and served as president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) as well as the Division of Educational Psychology of the American Psychological Association (APA). His leadership in these professional communities reflected his enduring commitment to strengthening educational research as both a scientific and a public endeavor.
His contributions to scholarship were wide-ranging and deeply impactful. His work helped to shape key areas of educational research, particularly teacher education and school reform. Among his internationally acclaimed publications are the standard textbook Educational Psychology (six editions, with Nathaniel L. Gage), The Manufactured Crisis (with B. J. Biddle), 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools (with Gene V. Glass), and Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts American Education (with Sharon Nichols). Through these and many other writings, he persistently challenged unfounded policy claims, defended the professional expertise of teachers, and advocated for evidence-informed educational practice.
For his lifetime achievements, David Berliner received numerous prestigious awards, including the Brock International Prize in Education, the AERA Award for Distinguished Contributions to Education, and the E. L. Thorndike Award of the APA. These honors attest to the breadth and depth of his influence as a researcher, educator, and public intellectual.
We had the privilege of collaborating with David Berliner over many years. He was an incisive thinker, a generous colleague, and a deeply humane presence in every scholarly exchange. Over the past decade, he served on the International Research Advisory Board of the PLATO (Positive Learning in the Age of Information) project, where his concept of warranted knowledge in the digital age played a decisive role in shaping the theoretical foundations for a framework of positive learning. He also introduced a powerful perspective through his idea of modeling for seeking truth in educational policy classrooms. This vision continues to shape the goals of our DFG-funded research group CORE (Critical Online Reasoning in Higher Education), whose International Research Advisory Board he joined in 2023. His emphasis on exemplary modeling as a pedagogical strategy for fostering truth-seeking has significantly enriched our work on cultivating COR skills.
David Berliner was far more than a distinguished scholar. He was a wonderful person, a cherished friend, a generous mentor, and a thoughtful interlocutor. Through his tireless engagement, intellectual openness, and warmth, he inspired generations of researchers. Until his very last months, he remained actively involved in multiple projects, leaving a lasting imprint on our work and on the field of educational research as a whole.
David Berliner’s passing leaves a deep and painful void - professionally and personally. We will remember him with profound gratitude, admiration, and affection. His legacy will continue to inspire educational researchers around the world for many years to come.
Olga Troitschanskaia
on behalf of colleagues in the PLATO Project and the CORE Research Group
Obituary for Prof. Dr Arne Nagels
We deeply mourn the loss of our former PLATO principal investigator, Prof. Dr Arne Nagels, who passed away far too soon on 9th April 2024. We will always remember his friendly and cheerful personality, his passion for science, which was clear to see throughout his outstanding career, and his great commitment and all-round support for our joint projects. An obituary from his department at Johannes Gutenberg University can be found under the following link: NACHRUF zum plötzlichen Tod des Universitätsprofessors Dr. Arne Nagels | Fachbereich Philosophie und Philologie (uni-mainz.de)
Obituary for Prof. Dr. Uwe Schmidt
The PLATO program as well as the newly established DFG research unit CORE (FOR 5404) mourns the passing of our brilliant colleague and principal investigator Prof. Dr. Uwe Schmidt, who left us much too soon on December 18, 2023, at the age of 63.
Uwe was an outstanding, internationally renowned sociologist and higher education researcher. He was the Director of the Center for Quality Assurance and Development at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (since 2012) and of the office of the Evaluation Association of Institutes of Higher Education (for Southwest Germany). He was a member of the Commission of Institutional Evaluation of FIBAA, of the German Council of Science and Humanities, and (since 2018) a permanent guest in an Advisory Capacity of the German Accreditation Council.
Under his leadership, important milestones in higher education research and practice were achieved, including - but not limited to - the expansion of the mapping to include types of higher education institutions outside the state universities and the reintroduction of degree programs in small subjects into this mapping. In the field of higher education research, Uwe Schmidt headed several successful third-funded projects, including projects within the PLATO program and one project within the new DFG research unit CORE. Despite his recent serious illness, Uwe Schmidt remained actively involved in various interdisciplinary projects, including PLATO and CORE. His unwavering dedication was instrumental in the success of these endeavors.
In his numerous national and international projects and corresponding publications, his particular focus lay with questions of complex interrelationships of study success and quality development in higher education. His outstanding research work is relevant for many domains and helped substantially to reduce deficits and desiderata in national and international empirical research in the field of higher education.
Uwe's contribution to higher education research, practice, and policy is truly remarkable despite his relatively young academic age. In addition, he consistently demonstrated enthusiastic support for the promotion of young researchers. His academic legacy is significant and his work will undoubtedly inspire many generations to come. With his untimely passing, we mourn the loss of an excellent, dedicated, border-crossing researcher in the interdisciplinary community of higher education, as well as a wonderful colleague and friend. His academic work has a strong appeal and will remain an example of an innovative future-oriented research vision in higher education and beyond.
In deep sorrow and silent appreciation, we would like to bid a fond academic farewell to our Fellow Uwe Schmidt. We hope that the family and friends of Uwe Schmidt can find solace in knowing that his contributions enriched the lives of so many people and that his work will continue to influence the field for many years to come.
For the PLATO program and the FOR CORE, Olga Troitschanskaia
New Research Unit Funding: Critical Online Reasoning in Higher Education (CORE)
We are pleased to announce that the new Research Unit “Critical Online Reasoning in Higher Education (CORE)” has received funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) for an initial period of four years (2023 – 2027). This interdisciplinary collaborative and international research unit aims to explore online learning behaviors and the online information landscapes that students in medicine, physics, business, and social sciences use for their studies. Besides Johannes Gutenberg University, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich (LMU) and the Leibniz Institute for Human Development (DIPF), international partners from renowned North American universities including Stanford and Harvard will be participating in the research unit.
For further information please visit our Website: core.uni-mainz.de
Doctoral scholarships awarded
We are pleased to announce that we were able to offer all five DIAPASON doctoral scholarships and thus support our scholarship holders in their doctoral project for three years.
Further information will follow here soon.
New Project Funding: BRIDGE (Performance Assessment of Domain-specific and Generic Use of Online Media by Young Professionals)
We are pleased to announce that the new collaborative project BRIDGE is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for a period of three years (2020 to 2023). BRIDGE is a collaborative effort between GU Frankfurt (Principal Investigators: Alexander Mehler, Jochen Roeper) and JGU Mainz (Principal Investigator Matthias Cornils) and is headed by Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia (JGU). The aim of BRIDGE is to assess the influence of online media used in job-specific educational processes. In a longitudinal design, the general critical online reasoning (GEN-COR) and domain-specific critical online reasoning (DOM-COR) of young professionals from three different domains – medicine, law, and teacher training – are measured using performance assessments and analyzed using innovative approaches such as educational data mining and text mining based on approaches from computer linguistics and learning analytics. The core of the project is an online training program that teaches participants how to critically deal with online information by fostering self-learning strategies.
PLATO Lab
Our recently founded PLATO LAB has been equipped with a state-ofthe-art eye-tracking instruments Tobii Pro incl. software. This tool allows for to dig even deeper in PLATO’s research on online learning (behavior) and information processing in digital environments. In this context, we are also looking forward to strengthen and further develop our cooperation with other cooperation partners to further build up a comprehensive learning lab at our disposal.
New Edited Volume
Our second edited volume is published:
Frontiers and Advances in Positive Learning in the Age of Information (PLATO)
| Part I: | Barriers and Facilitators of Positive and Negative Learning in Higher Education |
| Part II: | Learning with New Media and Technology |
| Part III: | Innovative Analytical Approaches for the Modeling and Measuring of Learning |
| Part IV: | Perspective |
Funding
RMU Funding: The Effects of the Internet on Learning in Higher Education
PLATO was granted funding from the initiative fund of the Rhine-Main Universities (RMU), from 2018 until 2020. The RMU funding has been used to consolidate pilot studies on the effects of the Internet on learning and to prepare a basis for a cross-university application to solidify PLATO collaboration structures.
(for more information click here.)
PLATO Funding by the German Federal State Rhineland-Palatinate
PLATO has been granted funding by the German federal state Rhineland-Palatinate, starting in 2019 up until 2023. The research platform is funded at the University of Mainz and is subject to regular evaluation. The aim of the research platform is to consolidate and focus the cooperation in PLATO on the basis of third-party-funded collaborative programms.