IQB Trends in Student Achievement 2021

A total of 26,844 fourth-grade students from 1,464 primary and special schools participated in the IQB Trends in Student Achievement 2021. Furthermore, the students’ parents, their German and Mathematics teachers, and their headteachers completed a questionnaire. The study took place at the end of the 2020/2021 school year.

The IQB Trends in Student Achievement 2021 tested competences in German and Mathematics. In German, the test items referred to the three competence domains defined in the educational standards: „Reading – Dealing with Texts and Media”, “Speaking and Listening”, and “Writing”. However, the study focused only on the subdomains of Reading, Listening, and Orthography, rather than assessing the full bandwidth of these competence domains. In Mathematics, the students worked on test items across all five content-related competence domains (core ideas) outlined in the educational standards, which were compiled into a composite indicator of global math competence. In Mathematics, the five competence domains include “Numbers and Operations”, “Space and Shape”, “Patterns and Structures”, “Sizes and Measurements” and “Data, Frequency and Probability”.

The test items usually consist of a stimulus – in the subject of German, this could be a text for Reading Comprehension or an audio recording; in Mathematics, it might be the description of a mathematical problem – and a set of tasks. Different task formats are used for this purpose. Closed-format tasks provide response options that students must select or arrange. In open-format tasks, students are required to phrase their responses independently.

The IQB Trends in Student Achievement 2021 also recorded learning conditions both within and outside school. This helped, for example, to examine whether different groups of students learn equally well at the same school and to identify ways of improving learning conditions. To that end, the study included written questionnaires for the students, their parents, their German and Mathematics teachers and their schools’ headteachers. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the questionnaires for parents, teachers and headteachers also included questions on remote learning. Furthermore, the study measured indicators of students’ basic cognitive skills to be taken into account when interpreting the results.

The IQB Trends in Student Achievement are conducted by decision of the ministers of education of the German federal states. Overall responsibility for scientific oversight and data protection compliance rests with the Institute for Educational Quality Improvement (IQB) at the Humboldt-Universität under the academic leadership of Prof. Dr Petra Stanat. The IQB developed, pre-tested and optimised the assessment instruments and questionnaires used in the study. IEA Hamburg was responsible for organising and conducting the date collection. IEA Hamburg also trained external test administrators, who then carried out the assessments in the schools.

Furthermore, IEA Hamburg scored the students’ responses and processed the data according to the IQB’s stipulations. The IQB analysed the data and determined the competences achieved by the students in the individual federal states.

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• Copyright 2025 Katerina Limpitsouni via undraw.co