Research-Education-Cooperations (REC) are seen to be a new and very promising approach to science teaching that allows students to get insights into authentic scientific work through active participation in current research projects of professional scientists. In this thesis I focus on the learning environment that developed from such a research-education cooperation called KiP. The learning environment in one sub-project called NEURO-KiP is examined in a qualitative case study ( Yin 2003), in

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... hich students participate as co-researchers (Fielding 2001) of their own learning experience. The data was collected in a reflective group discussion with the students, audio- and videotaped and finally transliterated. The transcript was analysed for its communicative content following the qualitative content analysis according to Mayring (2002). It was the aim of the study to collect the terms and aspects, that where used by the students to characterize the experienced learning environment, in a systematic way that allowed to generate an inductive set of categories. The developed set of categories provided the basis for the following comparison of the inductive data generated in this study with deductive characterisitcs of constructivist learning environments from existing literature. In this study it could be shown that the participation of students in investigating their own learning environment was essential for the quality of the generated findings. Further it was possible to show that the learning environments evolved in this investigated research-education-cooperation hold various features that are seen to be typical characteristics of constructivist learning environments that foster inquiry learning.