Abstract:
Results of international comparative large-scale assessments like PISA (Baumert et al., 2001) revealed serious flaws in the German school system. As a response, students’ intended learning outcomes have been defined by national educational standards, amongst others in chemistry (KMK, 2005). They describe competences students should have acquired when they receive their general educational schoolleaving certificate after grade 10. But, the competences are presented without a description of specific contents. Therefore, the issue of an evaluation of the standards with a paper-pencil-test have to be defined by a content analysis of chemistry curricula. There are just a few overlaps with regard to common contents between the curricula from the different states. Thus, the tasks for the evaluation of the national educational standards provide content information in the item stem. The students have to use this information to work on the tasks. In this PhD-study the influence of the presentation of content information on the item difficulty is analysed by a second task type. In addition, the predictability of the item difficulty by a normative structure model of competence is specifically investigated.