Defining proficiency levels of high school students in computer science by an empirical task analysis results of the MoKoM project

Abstract

In the last few years an interdisciplinary team of researchers in the fields of organizational psychology and didactics of informatics have worked together to develop an empirical sound competence structure model, a measurement instrument and a competence level model. This is considered a relevant step for the reliable assessment of competences and the development of competence based curricula to foster the recent outcome orientation of the German educational system. In this paper we publish the last component of our efforts: a model of proficiency levels, derived from the results of a competence assessment with over 500 German students. We describe different approaches to define proficiency levels and the process we used to derive them from our data. In the end, a detailed overview of the four proficiency levels is given and supplemented with exemplary tasks students should be able to solve on each.