Teacher education's primary goal is to train prospective teachers, which differs from study programmes, such as philosophy or mathematics, that do not cater to defined professions. This traditional understanding of the teaching profession becomes apparent when students ask: 'How is this content, topic, method, task, or question relevant to school…

In this article, competencies of teachers for an age of migration where students with refugee and migration background are part of many classrooms are tied to the question why a current reform in initial teacher education failed to adjust to an urgent need. The country under scrutiny for this case-study is Austria. The focus is on the curricula of…

Until now, TPACK has mostly been measured by subject-unspecific self-report measures. In contrast, this study introduces and analyzes an objective and biology-specific performance assessment of the four T-dimensions of TPACK. This instrument was used in combination with a biology-specific self-report measure to examine 206 biology teacher students…

Several studies have investigated (pre-service) teachers' attitudes toward inclusion. However, most have focused on teachers' attitudes toward the inclusion of students with disabilities. The understanding of inclusive education has expanded to the provision of educational opportunities to all students, not only those with a disability. This study…

It can be suggested that pre-service primary school teachers' sense of belonging to science may be influential to their professionalization within university-based teacher education programs, which intend to prepare them for teaching natural sciences in primary school. Nevertheless, because only few studies have examined teachers' sense of…

Comparing self-perceived quality of teaching to students' perception can be used in higher education to improve the quality of teaching of pre-service teachers in teacher education. However, comparing these measurements from different perspectives is only meaningful if the same constructs are being measured. To shed light on this comparison's…

This paper examines the effects of learning opportunities on the attainment of different proficiency levels in general pedagogical knowledge among student teachers to provide insights into their learning processes and the effectiveness of teacher preparation. The authors used a subsample of the EMW study with two time points, comprising the data…

Pre-service teachers often express a strong desire for more practical experience in teacher education, which requires teacher educators to consider new, meaningful opportunities for field experiences. This paper aims to bridge the gap between two 'practice worlds' - university teacher education and school practice - based on the example of the…

Teachers' diagnostic competence is fundamental for supporting students' individual learning processes and must be fostered in teacher education. Following a design-based research approach, a learning environment is developed focusing on preservice physics teachers' diagnostic competence in diagnosing students' conceptions. A core element of the…

Purpose: Sustainability is a major concern in education policies. This paper aims to describe how alternative economic education including concepts of the circular economy (CE), cradle to cradle (C2C) and zero waste can be addressed by teacher education. The author asks to what extent such alternative concepts contribute to sustainability…

This article reports how physics pre-service teachers (PSTs) organize their investigations during an exploratory data analysis scenario, which we call scientific investigations by data exploration. In order to analyze the PSTs' investigations, we developed a learning environment in which learners investigate aspects influencing the particulate…

Our contribution depicts the emerging of a 'Deficit Perspectives' scale (Döll et al., 2021) by surveying prospective primary level teachers' deficit perspectives regarding migration-related multilingual pupils, based on the theoretical framework of Migration Pedagogy (Mecheril, 2015). We therefore collected and analysed qualitative and…

Purpose: Mezirow's theory of transformative learning aims to evoke change on a deeper level of learning. This qualitative study with 38 pre-service teachers enrolled in a Master's degree programme for teacher education in Austria used semi-structured interviews to explore how diversity skills can transform after diversity training applying…

This research examines student teachers' thinking about teaching gifted students in an inclusive classroom context. Grounded in a narrative paradigm, we analyzed narratives from student teachers in Finland, Austria, Turkey, the Philippines, and Japan to identify solutions that they imagined in response to gifted students' needs in an inclusive…

Due to the rising linguistic heterogeneity in schools, the inclusion of pupils with a first language other than the language of instruction is one of the major challenges of education systems all over the world. In this paper, attitudes of in-service teachers, pre-service teachers and parents towards the inclusion of pupils with a first language…