Kultusministerkonferenz
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Education Monitoring

Education monitoring refers to the systematic collection, analysis, and evaluation of data on the education system in order to observe and manage its quality and development.

Goals

The overall strategy of the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs (KMK) for education monitoring pursues the following objectives:

  • not only to describe developments in the education system, but also to explain them and to link this with recommendations on how identified problems can be solved,
  • to systematically review and process the steadily growing number of research findings and make them available both for education policy and educational practice,
  • to provide additional information for explaining performance differences between the federal states,
  • to ensure that knowledge relevant for governance is actually used for the development of the education system and every school.

Within this overall strategy, there are four conceptually interconnected areas:

Generische Statistik
Befragung

1. Participation in international student performance studies

The aim of international comparative studies is to obtain reliable findings on the strengths and weaknesses of students in key competency areas in an international context. Currently, the overall strategy stipulates participation in PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS.

More detailed information on this topic can be found here.

 

2. Review and implementation of educational standards for primary education, lower secondary education, and the general higher education

The aim of revising the educational standards for primary and lower secondary education was to address changing requirements for teaching and learning in schools, particularly the use of digital media in line with the KMK strategy  ”Education in the Digital World“. Furthermore, attention was given to ensuring that the educational standards for the three school stages are more systematically aligned with each other than before.

The IQB conducts comparative studies between federal states (since 2015: “Education Trends”) for primary and lower secondary education to determine the extent to which students in the individual states meet the competency requirements set out in the educational standards before completing the respective stage of education.

For the general higher education entrance qualification, there is a common pool of examination tasks for the subjects German, English, French, and Mathematics.

More detailed information on this topic can be found here.

3. Procedures for quality assurance at the school level

The federal states additionally conduct state-specific as well as cross-state tests, such as learning assessments or comparative tests in various grade levels (particularly VERA3 and VERA8), language proficiency assessments for different age groups, or state-specific performance comparison studies.

All these procedures are part of a set of measures through which the federal states aim to achieve evidence-based quality development and assurance at the level of individual schools.

More detailed information on this topic can be found here.

schriftlicher Test

4. Education Reporting

The joint education reporting by the federal government and the federal states is another important element for monitoring the education system. Education reporting serves the purpose of providing information and accountability and makes an important contribution to ensuring transparency regarding key developments in the education sector.

More detailed information on this topic can be found here.

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