PrEval Symposium 2025

How practical must support be in order to improve evaluation? This question was addressed in the subsequent World Café of the PrEval Future Workshop “Support Services.” Under the guidance of PrEval partners VPN, i-unito, and BAG RelEx, attendees went through three stations where they could exchange ideas and develop concepts on the topics of methodological support, consulting services, and dealing with evaluation results and uptake.

Sofie Lilli Stoffel and Sarah Bressan then drew parallels with the international context. The PrEval project team from GPPi presented the results of international monitoring on trends in extremism, prevention, and evaluation. They observed a development toward hybrid forms of extremism in the countries covered by the case study, a demand for holistic violence prevention, and, in the area of evaluation, a threat of stagnation in the field. These risks should be taken seriously and addressed with the help of trusting relationships, systematic learning strategies, and independent expertise.

Myrte van Veldhuizen (University of Duisburg-Essen) then focused on the interlinking of extremism prevention and civic education in England and Norway. As part of her PrEval pilot study, she examined whether and how cooperation between education and prevention experts works in practice in these countries. The result: internationally, locally organized bottom-up projects dominate and there is openness to cooperation between extremism prevention and political education in schools. In the German context, however, further research is needed in this area, as well as targeted support for the development and evaluation of bottom-up projects.

The subsequent input from Hermann J. Abs (University of Duisburg-Essen) focused on new challenges in civic education, in particular the use of AI and its significance for the design and evaluation of corresponding offerings. Using a questionnaire developed as part of PrEval to assess young people’s digital skills, he illustrated how challenging this task is. The research team understood digital citizenship as the ability to participate confidently, participatively, and responsibly in digital and democratic societies—a normative educational concept that it considered indispensable in view of current developments. However, testing of the instrument revealed a tense finding: some young people perceived the questionnaire as one-sidedly “left-wing” politically. This opened up a discussion about the extent to which indicators for measuring the effectiveness of civic education should be normatively oriented, or whether the focus should be more on assessing overarching meta-competencies—such as the ability to reflect, tolerance of ambiguity, or digital judgment—that enable political participation without being interpreted as politically biased.

Susanne Johansson (PRIF), Andrea Prytula (DeZIM), and Marion Lempp concluded the symposium, moderated by Götz Nordbruch. Under the motto “Thinking ahead in evaluation,” the focus was on how knowledge from and about evaluations can be used effectively. Based on findings from a previous PrEval pilot study, insights were provided into close cooperation between science and practice with a provider of digital civic education. Our partners showed how interdisciplinary and participatory evaluation methods can be developed that take into account the special features of digital civic education – from the structural conditions of the internet to target group characteristics and platform-specific logics. Self-evaluation in particular proved to be a promising approach.

Marion Lempp followed up by emphasizing the importance of continuing such cooperation. Too often, valuable evaluation results remain unused, causing learning and transformation processes to stall. She emphasized that evaluations can only be effective if structures are created that consider and enable uptake processes from the outset—because in debates about effectiveness, it is not only important to demonstrate this through evaluations, but also to make the evaluation itself effective. A key task, therefore, is to systematically strengthen such structures so that results can be reliably fed back into practice and enable further development. In a creative conclusion, Lempp invited the audience on a mental journey to the year 2040. The participants developed “utopian visions of the future” for an evaluation landscape in which evaluation is a natural part of practice, resources no longer hinder learning processes, and a constructive culture of error has been established in which not only “best practices” but also “worst practices” serve as valuable learning opportunities. However, such a future requires trust and the dismantling of existing reservations – between practice, science and funding structures. Only when evaluation is understood as a joint learning and development process can it fully unfold its potential as a driver of innovation and further development.

Once again, the PrEval Symposium 2025 has shown that evaluation is much more than just a measuring instrument: it is indispensable for improving civic education programs and prevention programs in a targeted manner and initiating learning processes. For this to succeed, context-sensitive methods must be chosen, participatory and practical structures promoted, long-term financing secured, reservations dispelled, and a constructive culture of error established. Only when “worst cases” are understood as learning opportunities and results are reflected upon independently of their nature and systematically fed back into practice can evaluation increase the effectiveness of educational and prevention work and thus strengthen democratic cohesion in the long term.