Literary aesthetic judgment competence: Construct validation and construct extension (LUK II)

Educational standards and curricula for German as a school subject attach great importance to the development of literary-aesthetic judgement competence. However, no exact definition of this construct exists yet. This project aims at developing and validating a model of literary-aesthetic judgement competence, using aesthetic semiotics as the primary starting point. We distinguish three dimensions of literary-aesthetic judgement competence: semantic literary-aesthetic judgement, ideolectal literary-aesthetic judgement, and contextual literary-aesthetic judgement. Probabilistic analyses revealed that the three-dimensional model of literary-aesthetic judgement competence fits the empirical data better than a one-dimensional model. Even more appropriate is a two-dimensional model distinguishing semantic and idiolectal literary-aesthetic judgement after the contextual items were allocated a priori to one of these two dimensions. As expected, the results from the criterion validity analysis show a significant correlation between general reading comprehension and literary-aesthetic judgement competence. However, both constructs, reading comprehension and literary-aesthetic judgement are separable and represent partly distinct competences. Thus, we were able to construct a reliable and valid measure of literary-aesthetic judgement competence which can be used in assessments as well as in studies exploring the teaching and learning processes that are relevant to the development of this competence. The results of the first validity analyses will be investigated more precisely in scheduled sub-projects. Another particular project explores the development of literary-aesthetic judgement.