Moving towards Mode 2? Evidence-based policy-making and the changing conditions for educational research in Germany

Abstract

The 'Mode 2' approach is among the most widely used to analyze changes in contemporary science and innovation systems. This approach suggests that application-driven, transdisciplinary, reflexive, and contextualized scientific knowledge will be produced by an increasingly heterogeneous set of organizations, with universities no longer as dominant. Analyzing the case of educational research (ER) in Germany, which has undergone profound institutional and paradigmatic change since 2000, allows us to ask whether the Mode 2 thesis holds. Considerable investments in 'empirical' research and the top-down setting of the research agenda have, we argue, fundamentally altered the research infrastructure of this increasingly diverse multidisciplinary field, challenging the traditional humanities-based Pädagogik. Especially based on waves of large-scale assessments of school performance, the rapidly-growing 'empirical' ER field is characterized by quantitative and policy-relevant (applied) knowledge claims. Finally, we identify risks associated with rapid and policy-induced shifts in ER from Mode 1 to Mode 2.