Investigating Pre-Service Biology Teachers’ Diagnostic Competences: Relationships between Professional Knowledge, Diagnostic Activities, and Diagnostic Accuracy

Maria Kramer,Birgit J Neuhaus,Tina Seidel,Christian Förtsch,William J Boone

doi:10.3390/educsci11030089

Abstract

Teachers’ diagnostic competences are essential with respect to student achievement, classroom assessment, and instructional quality. Important components of diagnostic competences are teachers’ professional knowledge including content knowledge (CK), pedagogical knowledge (PK), and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), their diagnostic activities as a specification of situation-specific skills, and diagnostic accuracy. Accuracy is determined by comparing a teacher’s observation of classroom incidents with subject-specific challenges to be identified from scripted instructional situations. To approximate diagnostic situations close to real-life, the assessment of science teachers’ diagnostic competences requires a situated context that was provided through videotaped classroom situations in this study. We investigated the relationship between professional knowledge (PCK, CK, PK) of 186 pre-service biology teachers, their diagnostic activities, and diagnostic accuracy measured with the video-based assessment tool DiKoBi Assess. Results of path analyses utilizing Rasch measures showed that both PCK and PK were statistically significantly related to pre-service teachers’ diagnostic activities. Additionally, biology teachers’ PCK was positively related to diagnostic accuracy. Considering higher effect sizes of PCK compared to PK, the findings support previous findings indicating the importance of PCK, thus demonstrating its importance in the context of subject-specific diagnosis as well.

Highlights

In order to make efficient decisions during classroom instruction, teachers’ abilities to identify and interpret relevant situations and events that influence student learning have been described as an important part of teachers’ professional competence (e.g., [1,2]).Similar to the processes that a medical person performs, the ability to assess classroom situations and events in order to adapt instruction can be considered in the context of diagnostic competences [3,4]
The consideration of diagnostic competences is a critical element in teacher education, which is significantly important with respect to student achievement, classroom assessment, and instructional quality [5,6,7]
Overall, situated approaches for the measurement of situation-specific skills such as diagnostic activities that science teachers apply in practices close to the assessment of classroom instruction include, for example, classroom observations, reflection on lesson plans, responding to students’ ideas, or video-based analyses [47,48,49]

Summary

Introduction

In order to make efficient decisions during classroom instruction, teachers’ abilities to identify and interpret relevant situations and events that influence student learning have been described as an important part of teachers’ professional competence (e.g., [1,2]).Similar to the processes that a medical person performs (identifying and interpreting symptoms of a patient to decide on how to treat the patient best), the ability to assess classroom situations and events (e.g., how to implement an experiment in science instruction best, or how to deal with student misconceptions) in order to adapt instruction can be considered in the context of diagnostic competences [3,4]. In order to make efficient decisions during classroom instruction, teachers’ abilities to identify and interpret relevant situations and events that influence student learning have been described as an important part of teachers’ professional competence (e.g., [1,2]). The consideration of diagnostic competences is a critical element in teacher education, which is significantly important with respect to student achievement, classroom assessment, and instructional quality [5,6,7]. The statement is more of an everyday phrase than an explanation, partly meaningless. It doesn’t really make sense to say we repeat the last lesson and stop after two aspects

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Results

Discussion

Conclusion