Assessing Students’ Texts: German (ASSET-G)

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Jörg Kilian; Professor Dr. Jens Möller
• Subject Area: General and Domain-Specific Teaching and Learning ; Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 456083968

The application “Assessing Students’ Texts: German” ASSET-G investigates teacher judgments (TJ) of authentic German students texts. Correctly judging learner texts is a core element in teachers’ diagnostic competence, since teacher judgments of students’ performance influence classroom activities. Hitherto, empirical research has often failed to analyse the subject-specific quality factors of assessment in school. Therefore, we study teacher-, learner-, text-, and judgment-characteristics within the specific context of judging German texts at different levels of secondary school. In ASSET-G we use our knowledge from a project funded by the DFG and the SNF (Mo-648 25-1) on assessing students English texts. We create new hypotheses and instruments based on the experiences in ASSET, but transferring them to German as the subject dealing with the first language (L1) of most of the students and the common language in Germany. We bear in mind that assessing L1 student texts is different from assessing L2 student texts with regard to several aspects like genres or the importance of formal or content characteristics.The project consists of eight related empirical studies and focuses specifically on one of the most important text types in German lessons, reports as the key genre of German Sekundarstufe I. Its research questions can be summarized as follows: What is the influence of teacher characteristics such as professional knowledge and experience on TJ? (Study 1); what are the effects of learners’ gender and minority background on essay assessment? (Studies 2a/b); what is the influence of text characteristics, such as spelling, task-specific vocabulary, and organisation on TJ? (Studies 3a-c); how do prompts (Study 4a) and different quality levels of reference texts (Study 4b) impact on TJ? In all studies (except Study 4a) we compare judgments of texts of different quality levels from experienced teachers and students teachers. The basic research procedure is similar in all studies: Authentic learner texts are integrated into the Student Inventory, a computer-based research tool simulating a classroom assessment situation that enables us to operationalize the characteristics mentioned above. We confront participants with learner texts and ask them to assess the texts both on a holistic and on an analytic rubric. By experimentally manipulating text characteristics that affect TJ on learner texts, we can see which characteristics lead to milder and stricter judgments of experienced teachers and student teachers. ASSET-G will lead to a better understanding of TJ on students‘ German texts.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants