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The Student Pisa 2009 was a survey designed for students to determine their general education in German-speaking countries and to query information about their studies. For the study, questions on knowledge in the areas of politics, history, economics, culture and natural sciences were developed, tested and validated by interviewing experts. SPIEGEL editors from the various specialist resort were used as experts for the respective knowledge areas. The online survey was preceded by a pretest with 3,725 students for quality testing. The validity of the knowledge questions was also tested in a laboratory study. The test questions were checked for difficulty, discriminatory power and reliability under laboratory conditions and taking into account the standardized Bochumer Wissenstest in order to optimize the questionnaire for the main online study. The survey conducted by SPIEGEL in cooperation with studiVZ counted almost 700,000 participants and showed that students of political science and history have the best general knowledge. Business studies, art and biology are in the middle, while students of computer science or sports science bring up the rear. Students who earned their high school diploma in the states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt obviously begin their studies with an educational advantage; they perform better in knowledge tests than students from Bremen or Hamburg. Certain universities also prove to be breeding grounds for general education. There are very large differences between universities, but these cannot always be attributed solely to research reputation and the number of supervising professors, but also to whether a university charges student fees and whether students consider the university town attractive.
Trepte, S. , & Verbeet, M. (2021). Spiegel-Student-Pisa-Test (ZA6268; Version 1.0.0) [Data set]. GESIS, Cologne. https://doi.org/10.4232/1.13780
This dataset can be accessed for logged-in accounts at https://search.gesis.org/ZA6268