Improving biology and chemistry pre-service teachers’ use of external representations through feedback

Büşra Tonyali¹, Mathias Ropohl¹, Julia Schwanewedel²

(¹University of Duisburg-Essen, ²Humboldt University of Berlin)

Designing instructional materials is one of the most common tasks of teachers. Especially in science education, these materials are characterised by representations, such as pictures, diagrams, equations. As previous research indicates, working with representations is a substantial challenge for pre-service teachers as is in need of support.

In this project, we use the high potential of internally and externally provided feedback to address this challenge. An intervention study will be carried out in a pre-post-follow-up-design during in-service teacher training that follows on university studies in Germany. Dependent variables are pre-service teachers’ professional knowledge and beliefs about representations (N=120). In order to analyse the effect of feedback on representational competences, an evaluation sheet for providing both forms of feedback has already been tested and displays a high effectiveness. The piloting of the residual instruments will be ready by early 2019 and the results can be presented at the ESERA Summer School.