Measuring Student Teachers Level of Situation-Specific Skills for Need-Supportive Teaching

Abstract

In the contextual model of teacher competence by Blömeke et al. (2015), teachers’ situation-specific skills, like perception, interpretation, and decision-making (PID-skills) are regarded as central aspects that determine the performance of teachers in a classroom and are deemed as processes that revolve around student thinking and learning (Santagata & Yeh, 2016). Teachers’ ability to notice and meet students’ needs, in turn, influences their motivation and engagement in learning. In need-supportive teaching, teachers use instructional behaviors that support students’ basic psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. The aim of the current qualitative study was to assess student teachers’ level of PID-skills for needs supportive teaching. Due to the situative characteristics of PID-skills, authentic classroom videos were selected to assess student teachers’ noticing, analyzing and decision-making skills. After watching video clips, semi-structured interviews were carried out. Content analysis was used to discover what aspects student teachers notice; what is the level of their interpretation and decision-making. The study was conducted with 10 first-year MA-level students of several subjects teachers´ programme. The results of the study reveal that although noticing skills are of a good level, interpretation and decision-making skills can be described through lower levels, which indicate the need to pay more attention on the targeted development of student teachers PID-skills in teacher education.