Profiles of competence development in upper secondary education and their predictors

This registered report protocol elaborates on the theory, methods, and material of a study to identify latent profiles of competence development in reading and mathematics among German students in upper secondary education. It is expected that generalized (reading and mathematical competence develop similarly) and specialized (one of the domains develops faster) competence profiles will be identified. Moreover, it is hypothesized that students’ domain-specific interest and educational history will predict membership of these latent profiles as these factors influence the students’ learning environments. For this study, we will use data from the German National Educational Panel Study, including students from ninth grade in secondary schools (expected N = 14,500). These students were tracked across six years and provided competence assessments on three occasions. The latent profiles based on the students’ reading and mathematical competences will be identified using latent growth mixture modeling. If different types of profiles can be identified, multinomial regression will be utilized to analyze whether the likelihood of belonging to a certain competence development profile is influenced by students’ domain-specific interest or educational history. As this protocol is submitted before any analyses were conducted, it will provide neither results nor conclusions.