Competence Measurement and Informatics Standards in Secondary Education

As a result of the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) the development and assessment of educational standards became a high level objective in the German educational system. Following this tendency the German Informatics Society (GI) in 2008 published educational standards of informatics for lower secondary education that describe minimal informatics requirements for high school students. Up until now, no coherent competence model for the standards exists, but it is essential as a basis for the development of measurement instruments to adequately assess learners' competences according to the standards. This paper describes the process and a first specific step to develop such a competence measurement tool for the informatics standards. In order to figure out if it is possible to use already existing competence measurement tools for those purposes we compare the MoKoM competence model with the informatics standards categories. In this project an empirically proofed competence model of Informatics with the target group of senior class students and related measurement tools were developed. As a result of this analytical comparison we identify concurrent competence components of both concepts. For those components already existing empirical items of the MoKoM model could be applied to measure students' respective competences of the informatics standards. On the other hand the analysis reveals competence structures according to the standards that still needs to be supplemented with operationalized empirical items.