Professional Knowledge and Self-Efficacy Expectations of Pre-Service Teachers Regarding Scientific Reasoning and Diagnostics

Abstract

Understanding and knowledge of scientific reasoning skills is a key ability of pre-service teachers. In a written survey (open response format), biology and chemistry pre-service teachers (n = 51) from two German universities claimed central decisions or actions school students have to perform in scientific reasoning in the open inquiry instruction of an experiment. The participants’ answers were assessed in a quality content analysis using a rubric system generated from a theoretical background. Instruments in a closed response format were used to measure attitudes towards the importance of diagnostics in teacher training and the domain-specific expectations of self-efficacy. The pre-service teacher lacked pedagogical (didactics) content knowledge about potential student difficulties and also exhibited a low level of content methodological (procedural) knowledge. There was no correlation between the knowledge of student difficulties and the approach to experimenting with expectations of self-efficacy for diagnosing student abilities regarding scientific reasoning. Self-efficacy expectations concerning their own abilities to successfully cope with general and experimental diagnostic activities were significantly lower than the attitude towards the importance of diagnostics in teacher training. The results are discussed with regard to practical implications as they imply that scientific reasoning should be promoted in university courses, emphasising the importance of understanding the science-specific procedures (knowing how) and epistemic constructs in scientific reasoning (knowing why).

Exploring Pre-Service Chemistry Teachers’ Pedagogical Scientific Language Knowledge

“…Regarding Chemish, it is interesting to see that except for polysemy, no other characteristics of Chemish are named as difficult, although the symbolic component is used in the pre-service chemistry teachers' definitions and the different components can cause difficulties when learning chemistry. These results about the low extent of pre-service chemistry teachers CK and PCK stand in line with the results from Hilfert-Rüppell et al [78]. Considering pre-service chemistry teachers' explanations of the scientific terms to fictitious students, it was interesting to see that pre-service chemistry teachers seemed to have problems transferring the identified difficulties into explanations that address these difficulties.…”

“Let’s transform!”: A systematic literature review of science learning in COVID-19 pandemic era

“…The global world is filled with anger, fear, misinformation, distrust and discouragement (Reis, 2021), especially during a pandemic. Global society should be modern science-and technology-based societies (Krell et al, 2022) and has strong scientific reasoning (Bicak et al, 2021;Hilfert-Rüppell et al, 2021;Khan & Krell, 2021;Mahler et al, 2021;Meister & Upmeier Zu Belzen, 2021;Rost & Knuuttila, 2022;Schellinger et al, 2021). COVID-19 pandemic has provided on disclosing the fact that most of the public science education and learning.…”

Fostering scientific reasoning with inquiry problem‐solving experiments in an organic chemistry lab course

“…B. Schüler:innen oder Studierende) ausführen, um selbstständig eine Ausgangssituation experimentell zu manipulieren und die Beantwortung einer Fragestellung zu erreichen [9, 10]. Lehramtsstudierende der naturwissenschaftlichen Fächer weisen indes sowohl in ihren eigenen Fähigkeiten als auch bei der Diagnose von Schülerhürden bei der Erkenntnisgewinnung Defizite auf, sodass Förderbedarf besteht [11, 12].…”

“…Wie die studentischen Beispiele zeigen, liegen die Schwierigkeiten der Lehramtsstudierenden dabei an ähnlichen Schlüsselstellen wie auch die von Schüler:innen beim experimentellen Problemlçsen [30]. Damit sie ihre künftigen Schüler:innen nicht nur zu fachlichen Themen, sondern auch im methodischen Vorgehen beim Forschen adäquat unterstützen und Schülerleistung einschätzen kçnnen, ist eine Fçrderung von Erkenntnisgewinnungskompetenzen also bereits im Lehramtsstudium von Bedeutung [11]. Literatur…”