Empirisch-kriterienorientierte Analyse des fachdidaktischen Wissens angehender Physiklehrkräfte

In recent years, the professional knowledge of (pre-service) teachers has been intensively investigated. In addition to statements regarding its internal structure, there are also findings on the relationship between professional knowledge, performance in prototypical action situations, and teaching effectiveness. These analyses have shown that pedagogical content knowledge plays a central role. However, there is still a lack of an empirically grounded description of competency levels of pedagogical content knowledge. There have been some individual proposals, though they are either not empirically grounded or post hoc generated, leaving the extent to which the descriptions of such levels are applicable outside the specific project contexts unclear. This article presents a cross-project analysis of pedagogical content knowledge using two approaches to establish levels of proficiency. Therefore, level models were constructed based on data regarding pedagogical content knowledge from two projects ( \(N=427\) $N=427$ and \(N=779\) $N=779$ ) using the Scale-Anchoring procedure and a regression-analytical approach based on a model of hierarchical complexity. The Scale-Anchoring procedure provided level descriptions that, despite differences in subject matter and pedagogical content, exhibited parallels in terms of operators that are interpretable in terms of learning psychology. Across projects, the results indicated that pedagogical content knowledge in low levels is limited to reproductive aspects but incorporates creative and evaluative elements in higher levels. The model of hierarchical complexity turned out to be properly applicable only for one of the datasets and thus could not be further utilized for cross-project analyses. Nevertheless, the cross-project analysis using the Scale-Anchoring procedure provided context-independent descriptions of levels of pedagogical content knowledge, thus enabling initial steps towards an empirically grounded, conceptually rich assessment that goes beyond solely preparing a quantitative score.