The Simulated Classroom Biology

A simulated classroom environment for capturing the action-oriented professional knowledge of pre-service teachers about evolution

authored by

Julian Fischer, Nils Machts, Till Bruckermann, Jens Möller, Ute Harms

Abstract

Background: The professional knowledge of pre-service teachers is highly important for effective and successful teaching. In recent years, many research groups have been engaged in developing simulated classroom environments to capture especially the pedagogical knowledge (PK) of pre-service teachers, neglecting the content-related facets of professional knowledge such as pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Objectives: In the present study, we describe the development of a simulated classroom environment—the Simulated Classroom Biology (SCR

^Bio)—and provide evidence regarding its validity to assess pre-service biology teachers' action-oriented PCK in the area of evolution. Methods: This study examined the evidence supporting the validity of using the SCR

^Bio to investigate action-oriented PCK of pre-service biology teachers. The (1) evidence based on test content (expert ratings) and the (2) evidence based on relation to other variables (known-groups comparison) was obtained. We tested the SCR

^Bio with N = 76 German pre-service biology teachers. Results and Conclusions: Our results show the successfully operationalized PCK in the SCR

^Bio through explicit allocation of specific misconceptions to each virtual student's answer and the valid measurement of pre-service biology teachers' action-oriented PCK. This results in a validated simulated classroom environment for pre-service but also in-service teachers. In the future, the SCR

^Bio will be developed from an assessment instrument to a training tool to simulate explicit teaching situations. This allows to complement the predominantly theoretical components of university-based teacher education with practice-based simulated classroom environments.

Organisation(s)

Institute of Education

External Organisation(s)

IPN - Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education at Kiel University
Kiel University

Type

Article

Journal

Journal of Computer Assisted Learning

Volume

Pages

1765-1778

No. of pages

ISSN

0266-4909

Publication date

29.11.2022

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Education, Computer Science Applications

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12718 (Access: Open)