From Digital Competence to Informatics Education. Structuring a Wide Field

Currently, in Austria there is a major reform of the final exam (Matura) on the way and will be implemented in 2015. All subjects, Informatics included, will be affected in different forms. The underlying philosophy of this reform is a strong competence orientation, thinking educational processes in terms of students’ outcomes which are based on clear expectations and standardized objectives. There are central regulations in the main subject areas languages and mathematics, whereas in other disciplines, including Informatics, recommendations and guidelines have been developed, consisting of competence models, objectives in form of descriptors and prototypical tasks. Based on a preceding Austrian competence model for digital competence and basic Informatics education at lower secondary level, this paper discusses the current state of a similar coherent and comprehensive framework for Informatics education for upper secondary level. It will be shown that this framework provides a broad and consistent picture of school Informatics for general education, and specifically, supports teachers of Informatics with recommendations for competenceoriented tasks corresponding to the framework. Finally, one sample task will be presented in order to illustrate how abstract objectives can be associated to competencies.