Socioeconomic Disparities and De-Tracking Reforms: Students’ Educational Aspirations as Well as Socioeconomic Composition Effects on Student Achievement

This dissertation expands the body of research on the relationship between tracking practices and socioeconomic disparities in student achievement and students' educational aspirations. The topic is particularly relevant in Germany due to above-average socioeconomic disparities. Achievement-based differentiation such as allocation to hierarchically structured school types determines to a large extent how the student body is distributed across school types. The school type in turn has a decisive influence on their educational and occupational paths. This dissertation examines whether the recently implemented de-tracking reforms in some German states have indeed contributed to reducing socioeconomic disparities. These de-tracking reforms reduced the school systems of multiple types of lower secondary schools to a two-path school structure in which there are only academic track and comprehensive schools. After the de-tracking reforms, comprehensive schools offer all school-leaving qualifications including the general university entrance qualification. The results showed that the socioeconomic composition effects on student achievement at comprehensive schools after the de-tracking reforms were at a comparable level to the SEC effects observed at the intermediate track before the reforms. Moreover, the results revealed that students' educational aspirations increased as a result of the de-tracking reforms, but that socioeconomic disparities in students' educational aspirations increased rather than decreased. Overall, the results indicate that the de-tracking reforms have indeed led to changes, e.g., in the socioeconomic composition of comprehensive schools or in the increase in students' educational aspirations, but no reduction in socioeconomic disparities was observed, neither in terms of socioeconomic composition effects nor in terms of students' educational aspirations

IQB-Bildungstrend 2018

Im Skalenhandbuch werden die Erhebungsinstrumente dokumentiert, die im IQB-Bildungstrend 2018 in den Fächern Mathematik, Biologie, Chemie und Physik in der Sekundarstufe I eingesetzt wurden. Die Bildungstrend-Studien des IQB sind Teil der Gesamtstrategie der Kultusministerkonferenz zum Bildungsmonitoring. Sie werden regelmäßig durchgeführt, um zu überprüfen, inwieweit die Schülerinnen und Schüler in den einzelnen Ländern in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland die in den länderübergreifend verbindlichen Bildungsstandards formulierten Kompetenzziele erreicht haben. Mit dem IQB-Bildungstrend 2018 war es erstmalig möglich, für das Erreichen der Standards im Fach Mathematik und in den naturwissenschaftlichen Fächern in der 9. Jahrgangsstufe Trends zu berichten (Vergleich der Erhebungsjahre 2012 und 2018)