The variability of teaching methods in school chemistry education increased considerably in the last years, aiming at

developing cognitive skills of higher order like decision-making rather than making students memorize chemical facts.

In spite of this the assessment tools used remain mostly the same: paper and pencil tests which often focus on

encyclopaedic chemical knowledge. Thus there is a gap between the quality of teaching and the ways of testing. It

therefore seems feasible to develop new assessment tools that focus on broader fields of competence. Lab activities

offer possibilities for learning in important fields of competence and are of great importance in school chemistry

teaching. The integration of typical, complex procedures of science such as finding an hypothesis, planning and

conducting an experiment and interpreting data is the reason for promotion inquiry-based learning in science and

should be an argument for using lab-work as assessment-instrument, too. Therefore it is interesting how lab activities

can be used as assessment-instrument in everyday chemistry lessons and which effects such a use will have.

To answer these questions teachers and chemistry educators collaboratively developed and tested different ways to

use students’ lab work as assessment-instrument. A number of useful approaches, such as different types of modified

experimental instructions, arose, that can easily be created based on existing teaching material. The ways, in which

teachers can produce these instruments were collected, described and published nationally and internationally.

Experiences with such assessment-instruments show that they provide teacher with important additional information

and change the attitude of students and teachers towards experimenting.