How Preservice Teachers Refer to Different Knowledge Domains When Evaluating a Lesson Plan on the Tropical Rainforest

Abstract

In initial teacher education (ITE), preservice teachers acquire declarative knowledge in different knowledge domains: general pedagogy, content, and pedagogical content. To investigate how they use this knowledge in a school-related situation, n = 56 preservice teachers were asked to evaluate a peer's fictitious lesson plan. Their comments were subjected to content analysis and frequency analysis, which identified three distinct clusters reflecting different thought patterns. Participants referred predominantly to pedagogical knowledge, as well as some pedagogical content knowledge; exclusively content-focused comments were rare.

Keywords:

• Content knowledge
• general pedagogical knowledge
• pedagogical content knowledge
• lesson planning
• tropical rainforest

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the project "Professional teacher action to promote subject-specific learning under changing social conditions" (ProfaLe) funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of the federal and state governments’ joint “Quality Offensive Teacher Education” under Grant 01JA1811. Responsibility for the content of the present publication lies with the authors.

Notes on contributors

Nina Scholten

Nina Scholten (Dr.), is working in a post-doc position at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. Her research interests include geography teacher professionalization, instructional quality and research transfer.

Jörg Doll

Jörg Doll, is Professor for Educational Psychology at the Department of Education at Hamburg University. His research interests include attitude research, measurement of competencies and higher education research.

Nicole Masanek

Nicole Masanek (Dr.), is working in a post-doc position in German literary education at Universität Hamburg. Her research interests include German teacher education and professionalization.