Moving towards Mode 2? Evidence-based Policy-Making and the Changing Conditions for Educational Research in Germany

The ‘Mode 2’ conceptual approach has become among the most widely applied to discuss changes in contemporary science and innovation systems. Operationalized, this approach suggests that contextualized, transdisciplinary, application-driven, reflexive, and high-quality scientific knowledge will be produced by an increasingly heterogeneous set of organizations, with universities no longer as dominant in knowledge production. Analyzing the case of educational research in Germany, which has undergone profound institutional and paradigmatic change since the turn of the century, allows us to ask to what extent the Mode 2 thesis holds. Considerable investments in ‘empirical’ educational 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 traditional humanities-based Pädagogik. Facilitated especially by waves of large-scale assessments of pupils’ school performance, the rapidly-growing ‘empirical’ educational research field is characterized by quantitative and policy-relevant (applied) knowledge claims. Finally, we identify risks associated with rapid and policy-induced shifts in educational research from Mode 1 to Mode 2.