The project, which was funded by the Ministry of Science and Culture (MWK) in June 2009, aims to strengthen cooperation between specialised didactics and general didactics.

Communication competence, which is one of the cross-curricular competences and is also identified in various school subjects, is to be examined by means of a comparative analysis of material and tasks in new textbooks, the extent to which the requirements of the educational standards and core curricula are already being implemented with regard to various facets of communication skills, the extent to which the tasks and instructions for their completion promote the development of communicative skills and the extent to which subject- or subject-culture-specific trends or commonalities can be identified across broad subject spectra. At a conference of specialised didacticians and general didacticians, concepts on knowledge development, the role of learning tasks and the suitability of learning tasks for subject-related and interdisciplinary skills development will be presented and differentiated.

Didactics experts from the subjects of Biology, Chemistry, Political Education, Physics, Computing Science in Education, Economics Education, Business Didactics, Sachunterricht, Textiles, Philosophy, Religious Education, English Studies and the Didactic Centre are involved in the project.

The contact persons for the project are Prof Dr Corinna Hößle and Prof Dr Hanna Kiper The project is coordinated and supervised at the Didactic Centre by Vanessa Hinsch.

Further information on the project:

• Overview of the Pedagogical Week theme day on 29 September 2009
• Flyer of the symposium on 12/13 November 2009
• Poster of the symposium: Learning tasks from a didactic perspective - textbook analysis
• PowerPoint presentations of the symposium now available here:
  => Dr Hans-Joachim Müller: "Learning tasks and the development of knowledge"
  => Prof. Dr Dietrich Dörner: "Promoting the ability to solve problems"
  => Prof. Dr Gerhard Steiner: "Tasks as catalysts of learning processes"
  => PD Dr Uwe Maier: "Analysing and constructing learning tasks"