When Prospective Biology Teachers Visualize their Beliefs about Teaching and Learning by Drawing it, is it more than a Reproduction of their Experienced School Lessons?

Abstract

<p style="text-align:justify">Professional teaching competence is significantly influenced by beliefs about teaching and learning. Prospective teachers start their teacher training with quite persistent beliefs about learning processes. These beliefs are mainly influenced by the way they experienced their own lessons as a student at school. Previous biology lessons at school might be linked to the imagined biology lessons of prospective teachers. We interpret these future lessons as a representation of their beliefs about teaching and learning. The present study investigated how prospective teachers remembered their previous biology lessons as well as how they imagine the lessons they will conduct in the future. The drawings of 181 prospective biology teachers in Germany (Mage = 22.1; SD = 3.6; 64.1 % female) were analyzed using the Draw-a-Science-Teacher-Test Checklist (DASTT-C). Results of the study indicate that the lessons they experienced were mainly teacher-centered, whereas the lessons they imagined were mainly student-centered. Results of a chi-square-test indicate that there is no connection between these two drawings of biology lessons. This suggests that experiences from one’s own schooling may have no connection with the way prospective teachers would like to teach in the future. The results of this study might be used as a basis for further studies examining the development of prospective biology teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning.</p>

The Influence of Previous Biology Lessons on Prospective Teachers’ Beliefs About Learning Biology

“…Such a tendence was found in other studies [Klinghammer et al, 2016 (physics); Ferguson and Bråten, 2018;Southerland and Gess-Newsome, 1999 (not subjectspecific)]. The few existing studies indicate that German prospective biology teachers generally hold constructivist beliefs about learning at the beginning of the university-level teacher training (Schumacher and Wilde, 2021;Brauer et al, 2014;Markic et al, 2006). However, there is still a lack of conclusive evidence about the design of recent biology learning environments at German schools (Dorfner et al, 2017;Fischer et al, 2003;Widodo and Duit, 2004;Widodo and Duit, 2005).…”

The Improvement of Students' Information Literacy Through the Remap-TTW Learning Model

“…Biology is a branch of science that focuses on the study of human living [1,2]. Consequently, biological expertise is required for the solvency of human life-related issues, such as the issues of the environment and human health [3].…”

Conceptions of prospective biology teachers about the Wadden Sea ecosystem

“…In this context, the respondents perceived biology teaching as an interactive, lecture-based, and visual process ( Subramaniam, 2014 ). In general, experiences from one’s own school years were not found to have any connection with the way prospective teachers want to teach in the future ( Schumacher and Wilde, 2021 ).…”