A method for the secured storing of a data element of a predefined data type to be stored by a computer program in an external memory, which is connected to a microcontroller, an error correction value of one error correction value data type being used. The method includes, when creating the computer program: defining a composite data element that includes one element of the data type and one element of the error correction value data type, in the computer program; and when executing the computer program: calculating the error correction value for the data element to be stored; forming an error correction data element as the composite data element, which contains the data element to be stored and the associated error correction value, which has been calculated for the data element; and writing the error correction data element to a memory address for the error correction data element.