Open Access

Kerstin Haas, Jürgen Mottok

• Research-oriented learning provides students the opportunity to develop their research competences by experiencing research practice, this often happens in the surrounding of research associations with different universities and companies. This paper introduces a two-step approach to evaluate the research-oriented learning within a research association. First we conduct the evaluation of theResearch-oriented learning provides students the opportunity to develop their research competences by experiencing research practice, this often happens in the surrounding of research associations with different universities and companies. This paper introduces a two-step approach to evaluate the research-oriented learning within a research association. First we conduct the evaluation of the research environment with the instrument of the adapted Collaboration Maturity Model (Col-MM) to see whether the collaboration network and the management is able to support the students in their learning process. Additionally, we take into account the evaluation of the students’ research competence. This approach targets the assessment of the starting conditions of the students and to compare their performance level until the end of the research association project phase. These two evaluation phases provide the potential to create an ideal research environment and consequently enable the students to develop and improve their research competence.…