Abstract:

Competence development is a lifelong process which neither starts nor ends with students’ university education. This is particularly crucial for German preservice teachers who make a lasting job decision with their choice of a study programme. Thus, their competence profile at the start of preservice teacher training might be determining for their performance at university as well as during their teaching career.

Until now, research focussed on pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and content knowledge (CK) as most important competencies of preservice teachers (Kaiser et al, 2017; Kunter et al., 2011). Thereby neglecting comprehensive professional competencies which might be necessary to develop PCK and CK and help teachers deal with future obstacles in their professional life (Kuhn, Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, Pant & Hannover, 2016).

Since PCK and CK are mainly developed during the university education and cannot yet be found in all prospective preservice teachers and a comprehensive lifelong model of basic competencies we developed a new model. Our focus is on key competencies prospective students, preservice teachers and teachers need to successfully graduate university and teach.

Consistent with current competence research, questionnaires mainly consist of teaching-related items which are too much to answer for (prospective) students lacking imagination and experience in the context. This might lead to weaker test results, even though these students dispose of said competencies.

By conducting expert interviews with teachers, preservice teachers and university lecturers as well as extensive literature research we identified a competence model with 12 basic competencies and developed items for each dimension. We paid special attention to developing items that can be answered by prospective students and first-year preservice teachers without practical experience. The dimensions can further be clustered into methodological (problem solving competence and explanatory competence), social (eastablishing relationships) and personal competencies (self-evaluation competence, self-motivation competence, self-reflection competence, self-organisation and planning competence, mindfulness). Using explorative factor analysis and considering item difficulty, we reduced an item pool of 60 items stepwise to three items per dimension. In a final step, the competence model was confirmed on a sample of German preservice teachers and validated using a confirmatory factor analysis. Our final questionnaire may be used to test said dimensions conjointly or individually.

Our model and questionnaire help to investigate competence development of preservice teachers lifelong from the decision to become a teacher, at the start of preservice teacher training, during their professional life until retirement. So far, it has been used in an Online-Self-Assessment for prospective preservice teachers at a German University and a longitudinal panel study.

Keywords:

Competence development, competence model, preservice teachers, questionnaire development, competence evaluation.