The consideration of individualised learning requirements and backgrounds of pupils is a central foundation for inclusive teaching practices. This includes the constant adaption of school development processes as well as lesson planning. Within this discourse, the relevance of assessment is often highlighted (Neumann & Lütje-Klose 2020; Prengel 2016). The guiding assumption is that inclusive school must pursue the goal of offering all students options for individualized learning while acknowledging their diversity (Prengel 2016; Werning 2020). Teaching in inclusive classes therefore means assessing individual needs of students. The meaning and practice of assessment can be understood in different ways though. Those understandings move between a logic of placement on the one hand and a (process-centered) focus of educational support on the other hand (Mitchell 2008; Prengel 2016; Schmidt 2018). This leads to the question, whether assessment is used to assess learning outcomes, e.g. at the end of the school year, and then place pupils accordingly (“summative assessment”, Mitchell 2008, 201) or whether it is used to constantly gather information about individual learning situations in teaching practice and base the constant development of classes on this (“formative assessment”, ibid.). The discourse of inclusion shows an increasing focus on process-centered procedures, since they address all students in heterogeneous learning groups. In this form of assessment Mitchell (ibid., 184) sees (among others) a chance for individual learning, so students “have the opportunity to improve” (ibid.: 184). This also means to find out “why some learners do not succeed and to adapt the curriculum and [to] re-design your teaching to rectify any problems” (ibid.: 184 f.).

Inclusive school developments therefore means highlighting the heterogeneity of students. Here it is necessary to reduce discrimination and disadvantages which is requested and supported on different political levels (e.g. UN-BRK 2006; KMK 2022). The implementation of requirements like this depend on structural conditions of the school system. In this context segregated school systems, such as in Germany, impose additional challenges (Werning & Arndt 2015). Concerning political specifications about development of school and teaching, core curriculums can be viewed as essential baselines for school development and teaching practice. This is, among others, shown by Mihajlovic (2022) for Finland, Buchner & Petrik (2022) for Austria an Caspari (2021) for Germany.

Here this project can be situated. In a comparing perspective it analyses the German core curriculums for the school subject ,German’. Studies comparing teaching practice (on an international level) have shown repeatedly that teachers in Germany often fail to assess their students needs adequately (Schmidt 2018: 15, Mahlau et al. 2020: 88f, McElvany et al. 2023: 180). Furthermore, they struggle to combine assessment and teaching practices, since they often do not adapt their teaching accordingly (Walm et al. 2017, 114 f.). Our project therefore asks in what way assessment is implemented in the different German states and (secondary) school forms via core curriculums and therefore which base is given for teaching in heterogeneous settings.

This project focuses on core curriculums. It follows the assumptions that those official documents offer important clues on which forms of pedagogical practices are desired and anticipated on a political level (Buchner et al. 2020). Furthermore, Caspari (2021) assumes that the transformation of curriculum contents can prelude development on school and teaching levels. According to Mihajlovic (2022) curricula provide mandatory baselines for arrangements of teaching settings. While the actual teaching practices may differ from curricular guidelines, they still offer suggestions and stimulations to teach in specific ways (Mihajlovic 2022, Buchner et al. 2022, Buchner & Petrik 2023). An early sighting of potential data had already shown that the contents of the different curriculums, that are linked to assessment, often lacked an explicit connection to the topic, e.g. by using different vocabulary. Therefore, the methodological approach of this project needed to allow a very open handling of data. At the same time, forms of implementation of assessment needed to be identified across a large numbers of documents. For this, the grounded theory methodology (GTM) (Strauss & Corbin 2010) was chosen as an analytical approach. The GTM stands out among other approaches by its emphasis on flexibility in the research process. At the same time, it allows to discover concepts and categories as well as their internal connections on basis of data (Heiser 2018: 213 ff.). This approach allows it to identify parts of documents, which broach the issue of assessment only implicitly. The flexible changing between the steps of the GTM allowed the expansion of the sample even in the later research process. This approach resulted in a sample of a total of 75 documents. The number as well as the extend of the documents differed a lot between the different states. Considering a theoretical saturation (Strauss & Corbin 2010), as well as the fact, that many parts of the documents did not broach assessment, not all extracts of the documents in the sample were analysed extensively.

The analysis of the core curriculums has shown that all German states and segregated schools share a basic understanding of assessment. Assessment is supposed to show learning results at the end of learning phases. But furthermore assessment, as well as subsequent individual support, are seen as strategies to meet heterogeneous learning groups to allow optimal learning processes. This understanding of assessments affiliates to a broad scientific discourse. At the same time it is peculiar that the implementation of assessment differs a lot in some cases, when comparing the documents of different states and segregated schools. Here, assessment and teaching practices are often discussed independently without highlighting their connections. It is also shown that assessment is often broached way more intensely in those documents which put a specific focus on special need education or learning German as a second language. This way assessment gains importance in regard to specific differentiations between learners and, therefore, highlights them. Furthermore, the use of different terms instead of assessment is noticeable. This should be viewed critically, as unclear vocabulary may hinder teaching practices in contexts of team teaching (especially in settings of cooperation of teachers with different specialisations) or when beginning teaching at a new school (especially directly after graduating or when changing to a school in a different state). Our research connects to a broad international research field (e.g. Füssel & Roeder, 2003; Pinar 2013; Caspari 2021; Mihajlovic 2022; Buchner & Petrik 2022, 2023). At ECER 2024, we aim to discuss implications of our research results with a focus on curriculum research and its meaning for teaching practices, e.g. which hurdles might be expected, as well as on possible further curriculum-developments. In this, we want to highlight the role of curricula and curriculum research for the development of inclusive school and teaching.

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