State of the Art: Summary of the geoscientific content in German curricula

We analyzed the curricula of the natural science teaching subjects of all federal states in Germany regarding their geoscientific content. With this information we can better address the demand of teacher trainings and provide the corresponding geoscientific topics. We can also approach the ministries of education to develop geoscience curricula for all 16 federal states as well as the national Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK) in order to include geoscience education in standards for education and teacher training.

To provide a quantitative evaluation, we compared the German curricula with the International Geoscience Syllabus (IGS) and developed a classification scheme. The higher the ranking, the larger is the combability with the IGS which can be regarded as a good standard. Classification criteria are geoscientific content, education time, interdisciplinary relation to other subjects, application examples, experiments, level of guidance and grade.

The curricula in Germany are highly heterogeneous, both in their content and their level of description. Geoscience school syllabuses are available for upper secondary schools (SEKII) in Baden-Württemberg and Bayern. In these states also the teacher education and trainings have been organized during the past years. Need of improvement is especially seen for Hamburg and Niedersachsen where we found hardly any geoscientific references and also the description of the curricula is very poor.