PISA and Its Consequences on Science Education Standards in Germany

Traditionally, Germany did not maintain national education standards and respective large scale assessment. Instead, the German education system was steered by enacting control over input parameters such as teacher education, syllabi or resources. Basically, high level teacher education, thoroughly designed syllabi and allocation of reasonable funding was thought to create the basis for education that will guide students in their development towards educated citizens. However, participation in the Trends In Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in 1995 showed that German students’ science and mathematics achievement was far from such expectations. Moreover, the study revealed a particular proportion of low-performing students, as well as remarkable disparities in achievement between students from different federal states. Naturally, these findings initiated a discussion about the quality of the educational system. Once these findings were confirmed by the first iterations of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), policy makers decided that new measures for the assessment and development of the quality of the educational system were needed. Thus, in 2004 the formulation for National Education Standards (NES) for Middle School education in Mathematics, German, English as a foreign language and the science subjects was enacted. In 2005, standards for biology, chemistry and physics were published. Based on the idea of scientific literacy as the overarching aim of education in the three science subjects, the standards describe what students are expected to be able of at the end of middle school education. The introduction of standards fostered a new branch of science education research: research on models of scientific literacy as a basis of benchmarking the standards. Based on this research a large scale assessment program was created which is supposed to benchmark students’ achievement against the standards. The presentation will give a brief introduction into the German education system before TIMSS and PISA and the particular issues identified by these studies. It will detail the design and the specifics of the National Education Standards for science education and give insight into research on modeling scientific literacy and the findings from this research. It will conclude with a discussion of the impact the introduction of standards had on science education in Germany.