Sensitivity to diagnostic task potential

Teaching adaptively requires teachers to observe and evaluate the learning of their students. Diagnostic competences allow teachers to make adaptive pedagogical decisions taking into account students’ learning needs. In the context of mathematics education, the use of tasks for instruction, learning and assessment of student understanding is almost indispensable. As tasks vary in their structure and quality, they differ in their diagnostic potential, too. Diagnostic potential in this sense means, how likely the task is to elicit rich student responses and generate sufficient evidence to draw valid conclusions about student understanding. Although the importance of diagnostic competences of teachers, including a sensitivity to the diagnostic potential of tasks, is highlighted in research, there is a lack of findings regarding task selection in the context of educational diagnosis.
Addressing this gap, we report a study on mathematics pre-service teachers’ task selection during simulated diagnostic one-on-one interviews. Assuming that pre-service teachers select tasks based on their diagnostic potential, we introduce the concept of sensitive task selection. Sensitivity to diagnostic task potential means the selection of a task caused on its diagnostic potential. Moreover, we analyzed the relatedness of task selection and different components of professional knowledge.
Findings show that pre-service teachers differ systematically in their sensitivity to diagnostic task potential. The study revealed, that especially content-related knowledge affected the selection of tasks and the sensitivity to diagnostic task potential. However, findings implicate that pre-service teacher education should provide support, helping pre-service teachers to acquire diagnostic competences.