The interdisciplinary and international DFG research group Critical Online Reasoning in Higher Education (CORE) aims at investigating the online learning behavior of students in medicine, physics, economics and social sciences and the online information landscapes they use for learning. About three million students in Germany use the Internet every day to obtain information, complete assignments and prepare for exams. In doing so, skills for filtering, evaluating, and integrating the diverse and abundant information from online content are central. The need to understand and strengthen knowledge acquisition skills through Internet-based media is critical.

In the project Digital Formative Assessment- Unfolding its full potential by combining psychometrics with learning analytics (DiFA), an online course for teacher students on the topic of "Digital Media in the Classroom" was developed with the aim of exploring students' online learning behavior and providing them with feedback on their learning processes. The feedback is based on the digital traces of the students (e.g., mouse click data with time stamps). From these traces, indicators of learning behavior were developed, validated, and integrated into supportive learning feedback.

The study Investigating Digital Learning Environments (IDLE-Eye) investigates how learners acquire knowledge and skills in digital learning environments. While learners work on various reading and programming tasks, we collect interaction data with the computer (log data) and gaze data (eye-tracking data) in order to trace learning and working processes and better understand the way they solve tasks.

How do students learn to solve problems in digital spaces? And how are core skills of digital learning effectively supported? The National PISA 2022 add-on study on validating PISA 2025 'Learning in a digital world' assessment prototypes (PISA LDW) addresses these and other questions and explores the potential of innovative approaches to the predictive use of behavioral data from digital learning and assessment environments. To this end, tasks of the innovative domain in PISA 2025 Learning in the Digital World (LDW) are empirically investigated in detail. 

The project Reflective Online Search Education (ROSE) investigates how students’ individual skills and strategies to search for information on the internet can be fostered. The focus hereby is on the development, testing, and evaluation of a formative assessment with process feedback and reflective aspects to systematically foster online information search competences of learners during lessons.

Through technological innovations, new devices, such as smart home systems, are finding their way into our everyday lives. However, before we can use them purposefully, we often first have to learn how to handle them appropriately. In the project Conditions for the acquisition of operating knowledge for solving technical problems (TPL-basics), we investigate this acquisition of action knowledge.

Funded by the Centre of International Student Assessment (ZIB), the project Assessing Processes of Evaluating, Integrating, and Comprehending Distributed Information (DIVER) deals with the requirements and processes of reading and comprehending information coming from different documents and information sources. It examines the extent to which such demands affect current competence measures and what strategies individuals use when dealing with distributed information.