At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020, school and university learning were abruptly switched to distance learning, coming along with psychological strains and various learning lags on the part of the students. These problems come to a head when focusing on university teacher students, since an expectable competence lag on their part, similarly arising from pandemic-caused distance learning in university teacher training, could affect their future teaching in schools, possibly then disadvantaging school students a second time. To determine changes of teacher students’ self-concept of professional knowledge, we used data of a repeated cross-sectional survey carried out in a period from 2018 to 2021, including several comparable cohorts of overall N = 395 teacher students. This design allowed for splitting the participants in two groups relating to times before and after switching to distance learning. Our results show that the switch to distance learning goes hand in hand with lower scores on almost every dimension of teacher students’ self-concept of professional knowledge, although, in parallel, their scores on variables such as openness to experiences, agreeableness, and conscientiousness increased significantly, indicating a certain degree of compliance with the new situation. Beyond that, we report on an evaluative survey among N = 84 teacher students carried out in July 2020, offering further insights into their situation during the first semester of distance learning. Its results primarily show which specific aspects of distance learning the students consider in need of improvement. On the other hand, it becomes clear that they experienced handicaps in various areas, accompanied by a significant decrease of their core self-evaluations when comparing them to a reference sample. Practical implications and recommendations that can be derived from these results are discussed.

Already in 2016, the German educational policy adopted the Education in the Digital World strategy, recommending that all teachers should become experts in using media. However, despite this initiative regarding the promotion of innovative forms of teaching using digital media, most teachers did not feel optimally prepared to successfully cope with the demands of implementing e-learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Most empirical studies on potential barriers to innovation pertain to comparatively easy, changeable environmental factors, whereas only a few studies have focused on teachers as an individual factor so far. Since several organizational psychological studies on the relationships between innovativeness and personality traits in professional contexts identified the personality trait of openness to experience to be particularly influential on the innovative behaviors of employees’, our study aimed to explore whether comparable results can also be found in the educational context. Therefore, we conducted a cross-sectional survey (n = 201) to analyze to what extent the Big Five personality traits are related to pre-service teachers’ self-concept of professional knowledge and, in particular, its digitalization-related domains. The results of our canonical correlation analysis show that the two personality traits of openness to experience and conscientiousness appear to be significantly related to the overall professional knowledge of our sample. Furthermore, a dominant affinity for technology seems to be associable with the risk of lower values on personality traits that are regarded to be pedagogically relevant. However, we found that our canonical model could also get along with fewer variables since the actual digitalization-related teaching skills were not sufficiently reflected by the canonical solution but were rather caught up in the domain of pedagogical content knowledge. Interpretations of these findings as well as practical implications are discussed.

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