Illustrations as item stimuli to assess early childhood teachers’ situation-specific skills – a promising approach?

This chapter presents an instrument for assessing aspects of situation-specific skills within mathematics education among pre-service early education (EC) teachers in early childhood education and care institutions (ECEC) in Germany. Based on the model of competence as a continuum, the authors assume that perceiving mathematical learning situations is a prerequisite for skill in planning a math-related action. Existing instruments for assessing situation-specific skills in the context of ECEC are based on video or text vignettes as item stimuli in order to present EC teacher situations from early childhood mathematics education. However, developing such video-based items is time- and cost-intensive, as it involves filming and editing video vignettes. Text vignettes, conversely, hardly do justice to the complexity of everyday life in ECEC institutions. The instrument described in this chapter uses illustrations of typical situations within German EC education as item stimuli. To evaluate the test, data were collected from 233 pre-service EC teachers in the second year of teacher training. The chapter also reveals first results regarding the instrument’s reliability and test structure.