Konstruktion eines qualitativen Niveaumodells im fachdidaktischen Wissen von angehenden Physiklehrkräften

The present study aims at constructing a competency level model in pre-service physics teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge. In addition to content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge has been suggested as an important vehicle to describe teachers’ professional knowledge. That is, pedagogical content knowledge shows significant impact on the quality of teaching and students’ learning out-comes. Given the special role of pedagogical content knowledge, there is a great demand to assess teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge according to the knowledge structure and to group teachers along their compe-tency level. Nevertheless, no competency level model exists that enables a criteria-oriented interpretation of pedagogical content knowledge structure. For this purpose, data from a cross-sectional study of N = 200 pre-service physics teachers was analyzed using Rasch analysis. The ability and difficulty parameters then were converted into skill levels by the scale anchoring procedure. Findings show that four competency levels can be identified. Additionally, items’ analyses for each level and each facet provide a successive competency level model. For instance, students at lower levels are able to name different instructional strategies, whereas students at higher levels are able to reflect instructional strategies regarding different situations. Thus, the competency level model allows an interpretation of students’ knowledge structure and therefore goes beyond previous quali-tative descriptions of pedagogical content knowledge. The article discusses the implications of the findings for teacher education and development of pedagogical content knowledge.