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Formative assessment of student learning is a challenging task in the teaching profession. Both teachers’ professional vision and their pedagogical content knowledge of specific subjects such as mathematics play an important role in assessment processes. This study investigated mathematics preservice teachers’ diagnostic activities during a formative assessment task in a video-based simulation. It examined which mathematical content was important for the successful assessment of the simulated students’ mathematical argumentation skills. Beyond that, the preservice teachers’ use of different diagnostic activities was assessed and used as an indicator of their knowledge-based reasoning during the assessment situation. The results showed that during the assessment, the mathematical content focused on varied according to the level of the simulated students’ mathematical argumentation skills. In addition, explaining what had been noticed was found to be the most difficult activity for the participants. The results suggest that the examined diagnostic activities are helpful in detecting potential challenges in the assessment process of preservice teachers that need to be further addressed in teacher education. In addition, the findings illustrate that a video-based simulation may have the potential to train specific diagnostic activities by means of additional instructional support.

For students, cognitive and motivational-affective characteristics are the most powerful prerequisites for successful learning. For teachers, judgments on their students’ characteristics shape how they plan and implement instructional activities in order to offer individual learning support. On the student side, research is starting to find out more about the interplay of different characteristics within individual students. On the teacher side, studies still regard teacher judgment accuracy of only single characteristics. By taking a person-centered approach, regarding NS = 503 students and their NT = 41 mathematics and languages arts teachers, our manuscript joined teacher and student perspectives on student characteristics interplay and suggests methodology to compare them. We found that student assessments suggested ample diversity regarding this interplay–and teachers did not perceive this. In their views, “homogeneous” sets of average characteristics were dominant. Findings suggest addressing students’ views and the diagnosis of their characteristics in teacher education to enable individual support.

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