Configuration and Professional Use of Uniform Grading Guidelines in Statewide Exit Exams

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Svenja Mareike Schmid-Kühn
• Subject Area: General and Domain-Specific Teaching and Learning
• Term: from 2011 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 196154715

Statewide exit exams at the end of lower secondary education have been introduced in Germany because they are assumed to lead to more transparent and comparable certificates that are based on statewide, uniform exam tasks as well as prescribed grading guidelines. However, whether these expectations are met by current exam practice has not been scrutinized empirically yet.The research project presented here is intended to investigate how uniform grading guidelines are actually used by teachers of German and mathematics in the context of statewide exit exams at the end of lower secondary education. In this, the project is supposed to supplement the task analyses carried out in the context of the initial funding. Referring to the research in the field of Educational Governance (Altrichter, Brüsemeister & Wissinger 2007; Altrichter & Maag Merki 2010), it is likely that teachers do not base their evaluation of student performance on the uniform guidelines exclusively, but are instead influenced in several ways by the structural and organizational conditions they are situated in as well as their own individual attitudes, skills, and characteristics. The main goal of the research project described here therefore is to identify factors and factor constellations that facilitate or impede the application of uniform grading guidelines, and thus gain sound findings about how well the guidelines meant to standardize grading actually facilitate the transparency and comparability of certificates. The analysis is based on a multi-method approach with qualitative and quantitative elements: First, the configurations of grading guidelines in the different German Länder are described in a comparative, category-based analysis. The focus of the research project, however, is analysis of the extent to which teachers actually use the grading guidelines, and of factors and factor constellations guiding that use. This is accomplished with problem-centered interviews and a subsequent questionnaire-based teacher survey in selected Länder.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants