Using the theory of planned behavior, we investigated whether attitudes, subjective norms, and self-efficacy facilitate pre-service teachers' engagement in evidence-informed reasoning about classroom problems. N = 157 pre-service teachers were asked about these motivationally relevant antecedents to engaging in evidence-informed reasoning about…

Previous studies from German-speaking areas of Europe could not prove any substantial development in the competences and the pedagogical content knowledge of prospective history teachers during teacher training, and thus could not empirically confirm the effectiveness of teacher education. We report on the theoretical framework and the results of…

Engaging in service learning has been linked to multiple positive outcomes in students, such as an increase in self-efficacy. Effects have been found on both general and domain-specific self-efficacy. Research on service learning has indicated that feedback and gender had an impact on the increase in self-efficacy, though findings are mixed. The…

Providing instructional explanations is a central skill of teachers. Using interactive simulations, we examined the explaining skills of 48 prospective teachers attending a teacher education program for accounting in vocational schools in Germany. We used a performance-based assessment that relies on explanatory quality as an indicator of teacher…

In this article, we analyse pre-service language teachers' written plans for demonstration lessons in Germany. Our objective is to reconstruct and quantify generic and subject-specific planning decisions related to adaptive teaching, specified as the ways in which a lesson's main task fits the learning group's cognitive level. The focus is on…

Professional knowledge is an important source of science teachers' actions in the classroom (e.g., personal professional content knowledge [pedagogical content knowledge, PCK] is the source of enacted PCK in the refined consensus model [RCM] for PCK). However, the evidence for this claim is ambiguous at best. This study applied a cross-lagged…

Background: Key elements of instructional quality include the teacher's ability to immediately react in domain-specific classroom situations. Such skills -- defined as action-related skills -- can only be validly assessed using authentic representations of real-life teaching practice. However, research has not yet explained how teachers apply…

Chemists refer to chemical phenomena on different representational levels--macroscopic, symbolic, and submicroscopic--which are directly related and connected to each other. Especially in the laboratory, students have to reason about various mechanistic features at the submicroscopic level and connect them in a meaningful way to make sense of the…

Lesson planning of teachers as a research field has received little attention in terms of modelling and measuring relevant competences. As an innovative measurement approach, we developed a standardised method for analysing written plans of demonstration lessons. Our focus is on the demand of pedagogical adaptivity, i.e., the ways in which lesson…

The aim of the study is to give an insight into the evaluation of the program "Mentor Migration SALAM -- Spielen Austauschen-Lernen-Achtsam-Miteinander" (Playing-Sharing-Learning-Attentively-Together). Students striving for a teaching degree or studying Social education at the University of Education Freiburg, mentor a child from a…

Measuring teachers' skills to carry out the complex tasks required in teaching is an important means of evaluating the effectiveness of teacher education but remains a challenging activity to conduct in practice. It is necessary to optimise approaches for usability and effectiveness along a continuum from low-effort and low-authenticity measures…

This paper addresses an important task teachers face in class: the identification and support of creative and high-achieving students. In particular, we examine whether primary teachers (1) have acquired professional knowledge during teacher education that is necessary to foster creativity and to teach high-achieving students, and whether they (2)…

In this intervention study, we investigated how we could teach university students who were majoring in education to teach reading strategies. The goal of the study was to analyze whether and to what extent students would benefit from the intervention with respect to their own learning. Did their own reading skills improve after they attended the…

To address the special challenges of teaching computer science, adequate development of teachers' competencies during their education is extremely important. In particular, pedagogical content knowledge and teachers' beliefs and motivational orientations play an important role in effective teaching. This research field has been sparsely…

In this paper we describe a "Train the Tutor" programme (TtT) for developing the metacognitive skills, facilitator skills, and tutor skills of students in a problem based learning (PBL) context. The purpose of the programme was to train 2nd and 3rd year undergraduate students in psychology to become effective PBL tutors for…