How professional knowledge affects teachers’ diagnoses of students’ scientific reasoning skills

This study focuses on verifying the crucial role of teachers’ professional knowledge for diagnosing students’ individual skills. Hereby we are extending existing research on teachers’ diagnostic competences by considering the importance of diagnosing cross-domain skills – namely scientific reasoning skills. For this matter, we tested pre-service teachers’ own scientific reasoning skills, domain knowledge and knowledge about the structure and diagnosis of scientific reasoning skills. Additionally, we used video-based simulations depicting a classroom situation with two students experimenting with different variables in a biology or physics lesson for evaluating pre-service teachers’ accuracy in diagnosing students. Our results only partially underline the expected significance of professional knowledge for diagnosing students’ scientific reasoning skills as only pre-service teachers’ own scientific reasoning skills affect the accuracy of their diagnoses.