CONTENT ANALYSIS OF CHEMISTRY CURRICULA IN GERMANY CASE STUDY: CHEMICAL REACTIONS

Curriculum-assessment alignment is a well known foundation for good practice in educational assessment, for items' curricular validity purpose s. Nowadays instruments are designed to measure pupils' competencies in one or more areas of competence. Sub -competence areas could be defined theoretically and statistical analysis of empirical data by using Rasch models could reveal if the sub-competence areas defined theoretically are belonging to the same empirical scale. As a result of unsatisfactory results of pupils to TIMSS in 2000, national educational standards were implemented in Germany and research in the area of competence assessment was started. Though, the compulsory, comprehensive content description of the material intended to be taught in class is depicted in curricula. As a result of federalism in Germany, each of the 16 federal states provides a curriculum. The aim of this exploratory study is the identification of the topics most frequent across the curricula of the 16 federal states. Consequently, curriculum analysis of the curricula for two type of schooling in Germany, for secondary level I, for each of the 16 federal states in proposed.