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Future teachers’ general pedagogical knowledge from a comparative perspective: does school experience matter?

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Abstract

General pedagogical knowledge (GPK) is a central component of teacher knowledge. Teacher education programs in many countries therefore provide corresponding opportunities to learn (OTL), and in-school experience is regarded as a core component of OTL fostering knowledge in the area of general pedagogy. However, empirical research on the effectiveness of school experiences during teacher education does not tell us precisely how different kinds of OTL are related to GPK. This paper first reports on the conceptualizing of the GPK test in the context of TEDS-M. Then the relationship between practical in-school OTL of German and US future primary teachers and their GPK is investigated. On the basis of results from Latent-Class Analysis using two core indicators of in-school OTL (the length of time spent on teaching students and the extent of being supported by a mentor or supervisor), three types of future primary teachers in both the US and Germany are distinguished: “starting” (type 1), “autonomous” (type 2), and “balanced” (type 3). In both countries, type 3 future primary teachers reported that they had had OTL to reflect on and improve their teaching to a larger extent than the type 1 teachers. Type 3 teachers also generally achieved better GPK test results than type 1 teachers. Furthermore, there is also a tendency that type 3 future teachers show better results than type 2. Based on these results, we hypothesize that the quality of future teachers’ activities during in-school practicum matters with regard to important outcomes of teacher education, making in-school OTL an effective component of teacher education. Research findings are discussed with regard to the relationship between theory and practice during teacher education.

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Notes

  1. TEDS-M was funded by the IEA, the National Science Foundation (REC 0514431), and the participating countries. In Germany, the German Research Foundation funded TEDS-M(DFG, BL 548/3-1). The analyses prepared for this paper and the views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IEA or the funding agencies.

  2. Since we plan to use the test instrument in future studies, we cannot include more than these item examples in this paper. In case there is serious interest by other researchers doing research in the field of GPK we would be pleased to provide complete documentation of a shorter version of the TEDS-M instrument, specifically worked out for this purpose, including various materials such as about half of the test item pool, coding rubrics, scoring instruction, empirically based information on item parameters, and test booklets. This documentation (König & Blömeke 2010c) allows the use of this test independently from the authors who developed it. Please contact the initial author of this article for further information.

  3. Another psychometric indicator is the item fit statistics. The weighted mean squares mainly ranged from 0.80 to 1.20 with a few exceptions, which is a good result (Adams & Wu 2002; Wright et al. 1994). Exceptions occurred when an item could not be excluded for conceptual reasons. Then we accepted weighted mean squares ranging from 0.75 to 0.79 and from 1.21 to 1.25.

  4. Although items asking for the absolute time spent on teaching are important as well, they were not included in the TEDS-M survey.

  5. A subgroup of future teachers belonging to this type reported less than ¼ of the time being accompanied by a mentor/supervisor (Germany 54.6 %, USA 25.0 %; see Table 1). However, since they also reported that they spent less than ¼ of the time on teaching and can thus be contrasted to the other two types, we still consider the label “starting” to be appropriate.

  6. The predictors “Latent Class 2” and “Latent Class 3” in Table 5 indicate whether a future teacher belongs to that specific class (code 1) or not (code 0).

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  1. Empirical School Research, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

    Johannes König

  2. Instructional Research, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Sigrid Blömeke

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König, J., Blömeke, S. Future teachers’ general pedagogical knowledge from a comparative perspective: does school experience matter?. ZDM Mathematics Education 44, 341–354 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-012-0394-1

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