Assessment of heterogeneous learning conditions in religious education

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Today, assessment competency is considered a central component of teachers’ professional knowledge. In addition to teaching, educating and innovating, the professional standards of the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs in the Federal Republic of Germany identify assessment and counselling as critical competencies for dealing professionally with diversity in schools. Teachers should be able to correctly asses the individual learning conditions of their students, difficulties during the learning process, learning progress, and results to react to them with appropriate teaching measures. While in the educational sciences as well as in particular subject didactics, a multitude of studies has been presented in recent years that examine the assessment competency of teachers, there is only a little research in the didactics of religion that deals mainly with the diagnostic competency of religious education teachers or examines it as a partial competence of their professional knowledge. The proposed project aims to advance research in the didactics of religion on the assessment competency of religious education teachers. It will be investigated whether, how and with what aim teachers assess students in religious education, which aspects of their professional knowledge are relevant, whether their judgements are correct and whether correct assessments are associated with higher teaching quality in religious education. To achieve the research goals, a mixed-methods design will be used. On the one hand, religious education teachers will be asked about their ideas and practices regarding assessment in religious education and their professional knowledge using problem-centered interviews. On the other hand, the interviewed teachers are asked to assess the learning conditions of their pupils using quantitative questionnaires. These will be collected in parallel using questionnaires for the pupils to determine the accuracy of the judgements and their correlation with the quality of teaching as perceived by the pupils. Further, the qualitative and quantitative results will be interpretatively related to each other to reconstruct connections between professional knowledge, assessment and teaching quality. The results of the project are of theoretical, empirical and practical significance. On a theoretical level, they contribute to a better understanding of assessment competency in religious education. On an empirical level, they help to identify typical processes and blind spots of assessment in religious education and to reflect on their relevance for teaching. On a practical level, consequences can be drawn for promoting assessment competency in the training of religious education teachers.