The project, which received funding from the Ministry of Science and Culture (MWK) in June 2009, aims to strengthen collaboration between subject-specific didactics and general didactics.

Communication skills, which are classified as cross-curricular competences and are also specified subject-specifically in various school subjects, will be examined by means of a comparative analysis of materials and tasks in recent school textbooks to assess the extent to which the requirements of educational standards and core curricula regarding various facets of communication skills have already been implemented, to what extent the tasks and guidance on how to tackle them promote the development of communicative skills, and to what extent subject-specific or subject-culture-specific trends – or indeed commonalities – can be identified across a broad spectrum of subjects. At a symposium bringing together subject-specific and general didactics experts, concepts relating to knowledge construction, the role of learning tasks and the alignment of learning tasks with subject-specific and cross-curricular competence development will be presented and explored in detail.

The project involves educationalists specialising in the subjects of biology, chemistry, political education, physics, Computing Science in education, Economics Education, business education, General Studies, textile design, philosophy, religious education, English studies, as well as the Centre for Educational Studies.

The project’s contact persons are Prof. Dr Corinna Hößle () and Prof. Dr Hanna Kiper (). The project is coordinated and supervised at the Centre for Didactics by Vanessa Hinsch ().

Further information on the project:

• Overview of the thematic day during Pedagogical Week on 29 September 2009
• Flyer for the symposium on 12–13 November 2009
• Poster for the symposium: Learning tasks from a subject-specific didactic perspective – textbook analysis
• PowerPoint presentations from the symposium are now available here:
  => Dr Hans-Joachim Müller: “Learning tasks and the construction of knowledge”
  => Prof. Dr Dietrich Dörner: “Fostering problem-solving skills”
  => Prof. Dr Gerhard Steiner: “Tasks as catalysts for learning processes”
  => PD Dr Uwe Maier: “Analysing and designing learning tasks”