Pro OSA

Project lead
Prof. Dr. Stefan Höft
Prof. Dr. Dennis Mocigemba
Prof. Dr. Daniel Danner

Project duration
June 2021 – November 2023

Digitalisation in the working world spares no professor or educational or career counsellor. There is an increasing need for digital media and processes in these fields too. Online self assessments (OSAs) have enjoyed popularity in career and study counselling for over 20 years. The project Pro OSA contributes to the development of quality criteria for OSAs as well as to the success factors that are so important in their integration into professional counselling practices. There are three sub-projects within the framework of the Pro OSA project:

(1) Quality criteria from online self assessments (OSA) from various stakeholderperspectives will be defined. Based on this, the next step sees a development of a formative review system for OSA services. Based on these findings, the independent OSA portal, which has existed since 2016, will be extended by being able to compare over 700 current student orientation services (see OSA portal). These will be discussed as part of a national convention with experts from counselling practice and academia.

(2) This leads to an analysis of the integration of OSAs in professional counselling practice. The extent to which career and study counsellors learn and apply digital media such as online self-assessments both individually and in cooperation with colleagues will be examined, and also how they integrate these into counselling practice and what conditions in terms of space, time and social aspects they require to be able to use OSAs with clients to the best of their ability.

(3) The third, independent, part concerns improving the performance of cognitive ability tests. This sub-project examines three explanatory approaches to increasing performance in such tests, which may limit the validity of these procedures for career and study counselling.

The three sub-projects use various quantitative and qualitative research methods to cover a wide range of academic and practice research questions relating to the application of OSA. The findings of the whole project are diverse and are reflected equally in specific recommendations for counsellors, improved counselling services for prospective students and academic publications.