Subject-specific instructional quality in the german language und literature education

Based on the finding that German language and literature education only implicitly focused on teaching quality in the past, this article presents trends in German language and literature education research with regard to teaching quality. It can be stated that there are now several studies that are connected to the findings of general research on teaching quality and specify them for German lessons, especially with regard to the dimension “cognitive activation”. These are, on the one hand, survey studies in the context of large-scale assessments, which relate rather general features of teaching quality to German lessons and are so called subject-related. On the other hand, there are video studies in which cognitive activation is no longer conceptualized and operationalized in a general way, but in a subject-specific way. In the second part of the article, the concept of subject-specific instructional quality used in the “Profess-R” project is shortly presented. Based on the belief that the specification of cognitive activation is not sufficient for an adequate subject-specific definition of teaching quality, a model is presented in which generic, subject-related and subject-specific aspects are interwoven on several levels. © 2021, The Author(s).