Modeling and Measurement of Teacher Competence: Old Wine in New Skins?

Abstract

In the last decade, there is an increasing discussion on teaching quality and teachers’ professional competence (e.g., Cochran-Smith M, Teach Teach Educ 17:527–546, 2001). International comparative studies such as the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M) and the Mathematics Teaching in the twenty-first century study (MT21) reveal that German preservice and in-service teachers lack central competence facets (e.g., content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge; cf. Blomeke S, Felbrich A, Muller C, Erziehungswissenschaftliches Wissen am Ende der Lehrerausbildung. In: Blomeke S, Kaiser G, Lehmann R (eds) Professionelle Kompetenz angehender Lehrerinnen und Lehrer. Wissen, Uberzeugungen und Lerngelegenheiten deutscher Mathematik-Studierender und -Referendare – erste Ergebnisse zur Wirksamkeit der Lehrerausbildung. Waxmann, Munster, pp 195–217, 2008, Blomeke S, Kaiser G, Lehmann R (eds) Professionelle Kompetenz angehender Lehrerinnen und Lehrer – Wissen, Uberzeugungen und Lerngelegenheiten deutscher Mathematikstudierender und -referendare. Erste Ergebnisse zur Wirksamkeit der Lehrerbildung. Munster (et al.), Waxmann, Munster, 2010). These findings suggest that teacher education programs fail to successfully prepare student teachers for their tasks. A central problem is that – even if there is an increasing amount of studies on preservice teachers’ competence – research on vocational teachers’ competence in the domain of business and economic education is so far scarce. So the key issue of this chapter is to provide an overview of research activities in this field of interest. To do so, the chapter will start from a broad perspective with a look back on the origins of competence-based teacher education (CBTE). The focus will be on competence definitions, modeling, and measurement in teacher education. Approaches will be presented and discussed critically (Sect. 41.2). It must be stated that the early approaches were not successful because of a lack of conceptual clarity and precision as well as a weakness of the empirical foundation (for a critical assessment of CBTE initiatives, see Mulder M, Weigel T, Collins K, J Vocat Educ Train 591:65–85, 2007).