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Abstract Correct responses to the unitized items of PISA 2006 rely to differing extents on the contextual stimulus supplied. This difference is referred to in this study as the degree of contextualization. A selection of science items from PISA 2006 has been assigned to two categories, not by competencies as in the framework for the PISA survey, but by the degree to which the item requires the ability to extract and apply information from the contextual stimulus provided. The article explores how students in Germany and in other selected OECD countries perform in solving these two types of items. The results show that German students' performance is satisfactory when solving items which require knowledge to be recalled and applied but that they are also quite capable of extracting and using information from the item stimuli. Somewhat different distributions are observed in other selected OECD countries. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 46: 897–908, 2009
Nentwig et al. (Tue,) studied this question.