IQB Trends in Student Achievement

What are the IQB Trends in Student Achievement at the Lower Secondary Level? 🔗

The IQB Trends in Student Achievement at the lower secondary level regularly assess to what extent Grade 9 students across all German federal states meet the competence goals outlined in the educational standards for the first school-leaving certificate and the intermediate secondary school certificate. To this end, the IQB usually conducts lower secondary level surveys every three years, alternating between the subject groups of German, English, and French on the one hand, and Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry and Physics on the other. The results are analysed at the level of each federal state’s school system. This gives educational policymakers a clearer picture of which current measures are delivering results and where further improvement is still needed.

Who takes part? 🔗

Schools or classes in Grade 9 are selected at random using a complex sampling method, allowing representative findings for each federal state and across Germany as a whole. Approximately 40,000 to 50,000 students from around 1,800 schools across Germany participate in each assessment. Furthermore, the students’ parents, their teachers in the relevant subjects, and the headteachers complete questionnaires.

What do the surveys test? 🔗

The 2009, 2015, and 2022 surveys assessed competence in German Reading, Listening, and Orthography. In English and French, the surveys focused on Reading Comprehension and Listening Comprehension.

In 2012, 2018, and 2024, test items in Mathematics covered all five content-related competence domains (core ideas) defined in the educational standards. Here, the results are reported separately for each core idea and combined as a composite indicator of global math competence. In Biology, Chemistry and Physics, Grade 9 students completed test items in the competence domains of subject knowledge and scientific inquiry.

The test items usually consist of a stimulus – in linguistic subjects, 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.