Summary

In Germany, after the adoption of federal education standards all states introduced new curricula that were to be based on competencies rather than content. It seemed to be clear - although this had never been investigated - that competency-based instruction would overcome the factual or at least supposed shortcomings of traditional teaching which was guided by curricula written in the rhetoric of learning objectives. The article first analyses several widely recommended introductions to competency-based instruction finding that there is little clarity and consistency in referring to the new empirically based concepts yet offering a bunch of suggestions that mostly show up as poor re-inventions of General Didactics’ concepts. In a subsequent analysis of competency expectations in primary mathematics education standards close similarities to learning objectives can be revealed.