Die Modellierung physikalischer Kompetenz und ihrer Entwicklung

The definition and implementation of national education standards are considered by Klieme et al. (2003) to be most important for quality development of an education system. In Germany, national education standards for secondary level science education were formulated in 2005. The implementation, that is description and empirical verification of competence models within these standards is of fundamental relevance and poses a challenge for research in science education. In contrast to a model of natural science competence recently suggested by Schecker and Parchmann (2006), an alternative model describing physics competence is proposed in this paper. To support this proposal, at first strengths and weaknesses of existing competence models are analyzed. On this basis an alternative structural model of physics competence is developed, which describes hierarchically-ordered competence levels for different areas of competence upon the complexity of physics subject matter. This alternative model is extended to cover competence development by integrating a dimension describing the development of fundamental physics concepts. Finally, detailed procedures necessary for empirical testing are presented.