Diagnosing Scientific Reasoning Skills in Inquiry Settings

This study extends the research on the influence of teachers’ professional knowledge on their diagnostic competences by evaluating the influence of professional knowledge on the diagnosis of cross-domain skills such as scientific reasoning. Biology and physics pre-service teachers completed tests for their scientific reasoning skills, domain knowledge, and knowledge about the structure and diagnosis of scientific reasoning skills, and diagnosed a student’s scientific reasoning skills based on a video simulation. The results suggest that the influence of different aspects of professional knowledge may vary between different subjects, and that domain knowledge alone may have an effect on the accuracy of the diagnoses. So far, this could only be established for biology pre-service teachers. Since this study is still in progress, the results have to be considered preliminary.