Professorship for Developmental and Educational Psychology

Goals can be understood as elements of one’s personality. They are subject to biological, psychological and socio-structural influences, just as the entire development process. Goals are therefore particularly suitable for investigating developmental dynamics throughout the life span. The processes of goal engagement and goal disengagement are of particular interest in this context.

Goal engagement is particularly appropriate where the opportunities for goal engagement are favorable. From the life-span perspective, the first half of the life span is particularly suitable for investigating the pursuit of goals. Goal engagement can therefore be examined particularly well in the education sector because

(a) the developmental outcomes (especially school performance) are clearly defined and measurable in a straightforward way,

(b) the contexts in which the objectives are achieved are advantageous, even if they may vary a lot of course,

(c) both individual (e.g., self-regulation) and social processes (e.g., peer influences) play a role and,

(d) the subject matter has great social relevance today.

My specific research questions in this area are:

• How can school performance be measured (especially in the long run) and the methodological challenges involved with this measurement be met?
• What are the motivational foundations of school performance, and how can they be promoted? Can motivation also be measured and described objectively?
• What is the role of feedback in increasing learning gains (and development gains in general) and how can feedback be used to actively promote these gains?
• What are the 'positive side effects' of school performance, and what role do they play in childhood and youth development?

Example studies:

Prediction of the successful transition from school to work (Tomasik, Hardy, Haase, & Heckhausen, 2009);

Long-term school performance (e.g. Moser, Oostlander & Tomasik, 2018);

Positive development in adolescence as a function of school performance (Tomasik, Napolitano & Moser, in press);

Epistemological and methodological aspects of formative feedback in school (Tomasik, Berger & Moser, 2019)

Disengagement from goals plays a role when different goals conflict with each other, or when individual resources or socio-structural conditions are not (no longer) advantageous to the achievement of goals. In this event, disengagement is necessary, even though it does not always correspond to social norms and ideals. On the other hand, unwillingness or inability to disengage from goals may have problematic consequences (e.g. depression). In particular, the failure to achieve a goal ties up individual resources in unattainable projects,  hence being unavailable where they are actually needed.

My specific research questions in this area are:

• Who succeeds in resolving conflicting goals and in disengaging from unattainable goals, and who does not? Why are some people more successful and some less? What role do life experience, personality, cultural and religious convictions or genetic factors play here?
• Can goal disengagement be understood as an intentional process and, if so, to what extent? How can non-intentional goal detachment be measured?
• How does the ability to change goals develop in childhood, what is the origin of this ability, and what are the processes associated with it?
• Is it possible to train the ability of adaptive goal-setting? Where are the most effective starting points and are there any age differences in the trainability of this skill?
• What role do age stereotypes play in age-related disengagement processes?

Example studies:

Disengagement from training-related goals at the transition to university (Tomasik & Salmela-Aro, 2012);

Goal relations in multiple goal systems (Tomasik, Knecht & Freund, 2017);

Developmental effects of a positive view on ageing (Wurm, Tesch-Römer & Tomasik, 2007);

Role of religious convictions for goal disengagement (Lechner, Tomasik, Silbereisen & Wasilewski, 2015)

The processes of goal engagement and goal disengagement outlined above are often age-related, which entails practical limitations of their longitudinal or even experimental research. My third research area therefore focuses on the question to what extent contextual change can be used as a research paradigm in order to understand the processes of goal engagement and goal disengagement. Contextual change can be observed at different levels, ranging from major political upheavals (such as the fall of the Berlin Wall) and changes in regional structures (such as winding up the coal and steel industry in the Ruhr area) to changes in work, family and leisure contexts (such as parental unemployment).

One attractive aspect of this research focus is that socially highly relevant phenomena such as globalization, digitization and migration are at the center of the investigation.

My research questions in this area are:

• How do people deal with contextual change? Who makes use of the new opportunities that arise and who avoids them? What role do life experience, personality, cultural and religious convictions or genetic factors play here?
• Which contextual level is psychologically relevant for goal engagement and disengagement processes and what are the criteria for evaluating the opportunities and constraints at different levels?
• What are the concrete mechanisms through which contextual change translates into individual behavior?
• How can contextual change be simulated experimentally in the laboratory and how realistic is this simulation?

Example studies:

Demands of social change in East and West Germany (Tomasik & Silbereisen, 2009);

Effects of globalization on the developmental tasks of adolescence (Tomasik & Silbereisen, 2011);

Disengagement from demands of social change as a function of the regional opportunity structure (Tomasik & Silbereisen, 2012);

Investigation of the summer gap effect on school performance as a function of the social background of the pupils (ongoing)

In addition to the questions mentioned above, my Lab is also involved in the development of research methods. On the one hand, innovative experimental paradigms and evaluation methods are developed and validated. Currently, we apply virtual reality (VR) and natural language processing (NLP) technologies from the field of machine learning. On the other hand, statistical modelling involves the development of methods for determining developmental scores, for ensuring measurement equivalence, for performing functional analyses of motion data or analyses of causal patterns in intensive longitudinal data. In this area, the Lab cooperates with partners from mathematics and computer science.

My research questions in this area are:

• Is it possible to model human goal engagement mathematically? Which operationalizations and models are suitable?
• How can be ensured that the same characteristic, the same ability is measured in all persons?
• Which statistical models are suitable to model intensive intraindividual longitudinal data? What has to be considered if the manifest indicators of latent traits change over time?
• What are the possibilities and limitations of VR as a paradigm for performance diagnosis, for measuring contextual influences and for activating age stereotypes?

Example studies:

Application of ethological models of optimal foraging on human goal pursuit (Tomasik, Schuster & Ostermann, 2019)

Measurement equivalence and differential item functioning in probabilistic measurement models (Appelbaum, Lefering, Wolff, Tomasik & Ostermann, 2019)

Modelling of intensive longitudinal data with person-centered models (ongoing)

Use of VR technologies to activate age stereotypes (ongoing)