Melanie Hendler
Research for the school
Fake News, Artificial Intelligence and strategies to counter them are the current research interests of Melanie Hendler, a didactic specialist in German studies.
Which strategies are suitable to be able to understand texts at a certain age? How can they be implemented didactically? And also which cognitive-psychological and -linguistic approaches are relevant for this? How is AI used and contextualized in the classroom? Subject didactician Melanie Hendler is dealing with these and other questions. Since March 2023, she has been employed as a PostDoc at the Subject Didactics Center German as a Second Language & Linguistic Education.
Text Competence & Critical Readers
It's not just the high social relevance that the topic of text literacy has that Hendler values in her field of research. She is also fascinated by the creativity involved and the possibility of actually implementing her work in funding programs.
Currently, Melanie Hendler is working on different methods to help students better evaluate information in texts. One method used for this purpose is "sourcing". Here, the focus is not only on what texts superficially want to convey, but also on the questions: Where does a text come from? Which sources are used? With what intention was the text shared on social media, for example? This should help students to better orient themselves in the flood of information on offer.
Artificial intelligence in schools?
In her dissertation, Hendler already developed her own analysis tool to determine the strategies that students use when they have to summarize nonfiction texts in writing. Whether this will be increasingly done by programs like ChatGPT in the future cannot be ruled out. After all, artificial intelligence has long since arrived in schools. In fact, says Hendler, both students and teachers are already working with such programs. But there are still few recommendations on how to use them. She wants to change that with future research projects. In connection with this topic, Melanie Hendler also focuses on teaching (scientific) text competence. Prior knowledge of topics is to be activated in order to check, after an AI Awarness phase based on this, what an AI can actually do within such a topic area. How can AI support my (scientific) work? And what are its limitations? What legal and ethical aspects need to be considered? Based on this, different strategies for the use of AI can then be developed.
Melanie Hendler studied German language and literature in Graz and completed her doctoral studies "Doctor of Philosophy Fachdidaktik, Germanistik" in 2023. Her dissertation, written under the supervision of Sabine Schmölzer-Eibinger, is entitled "Sachtexte lesen, verstehen, zusammenfassen" ("Reading, understanding, summarizing non-fiction texts") and is available via the Open Access Publication Server and can be accessed via the open access publication server. Melanie Hendler has been employed as a PostDoc at the Center for Teaching German as a Second Language & Language Education since March of this year.
Ulrike Freitag