Pre-Service Teacher Students’ Epistemological Beliefs about Educational Psychology at the Beginning and at the End of their Academic Program

Zumbach, J.Z. (Jörg)¹, Deibl, I.D. (Ines)¹, Geiger, V.G. (Viola)¹, Martinek, D.M. (Daniela)^1
1University of Salzburg

 

Submission type

Oral only

Scheduled

Jacobzaal, 26-09-2019, 11:00 - 12:00

Keywords

epistemological beliefs, educational psychology, pre-service teacher education

Summary

Epistemological beliefs are crucial for teachers as their attitudes and beliefs are essential for planning and designing learning processes. Therefore, it’s important to address these beliefs already during their pre-service teacher education.

Our research question addressed how the knowledge about educational psychology and the epistemological beliefs about this discipline change from the beginning to the end of teacher education.

Overall 252 students participated. The questionnaire consists of seven subscales: Scholarly Standard Practice, Relevance of the Discipline, Scientific Quality, Usefulness, Source of Knowing, Certainty of Knowledge, and Mandatory Character of the Course. We measured students’ domain knowledge within the domain of educational psychology.

We found a change of students’ beliefs regarding Usefulness and Relevance of educational psychology for their profession as master students judge these criteria significantly higher. They also judge Source of Knowing as more reliable and identify more genuine fields of the discipline correctly.

We could not find a difference on students’ judgments about the Scientific Quality of educational psychology. Their Certainty of Knowledge actually decreased during the program.

Taken together, pre-service teacher training programs need to focus on the development of such beliefs as well as on the change of students’ misconceptions in domains such as educational psychology.

Auteurs