Birgit Jana Neuhaus

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich | LMU · Faculty of Biology

A core element of teacherss' professional knowledge is their Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK). The Refined Consensus Model of PCK defines three realms of PCK: collective PCK, personal PCK and enacted PCK. ePCK encompasses the acts of planning and reflecting on a lesson. Digital simulations allow the training of transferring pPCK to ePCK in early...

The potential contribution of digital tools to quality instruction is a widely debated issue in STEM education. As a first step to investigate this potential, it is necessary to understand how instructional quality and digital tool use are interrelated. Although previous research generally hinted that instructional quality and the use of digital to...

Simulation-based learning is being increasingly implemented across different domains of higher education to facilitate essential skills and competences (e.g. diagnostic skills, problem-solving, etc.). However, the lack of research that assesses and compares simulations used in different contexts (e.g., from design perspective) makes it challenging...

Introduction Ways to improve the quality of doctoral education are debated internationally. In Europe, the United States, and other countries, there have been policy initiatives to address these. One approach has been the implementation of so-called structured doctoral training programs (doctoral programs) including formal structures such as course...

Diagnostic competences of teachers are an essential prerequisite for the individual support of students and, therefore, highly important. There is a substantial amount of research on teachers’ diagnostic competences, mostly operationalized as diagnostic accuracy, and on how diagnostic competences may be influenced by teachers’ professional knowledg...

This article aims to investigate relationships between the different realms of PCK by referring to the refined consensus model of PCK. We conducted a pre–post study with an intervention using a video-based simulated learning environment to measure different realms of PCK of 78 pre-service biology teachers. The participants were randomly assigned to...

In recent years, the call for an evidence-based practice has become more prevalent for educational professionals. However, educational professionals are rarely prepared for evidence-based practice; for example, teachers are not prepared to use and, thus, rarely do use scientific evidence in planning lessons. The knowledge and skills in appraising s...

Preprint available at: https://psyarxiv.com/bf92d - Purpose: To advance the learning of professional practices in teacher education and medical education, this conceptual paper aims to introduce the idea of representational scaffolding for digital simulations in higher education. Design/methodology/approach: This study outlines the ideas of cor...

In this article, we analyse how to improve pre-service biology teachers’ pPCK (personal Pedagogical Content Knowledge), professional values and motivational orientations in the field of academic and scientific language. On the basis of the theory of the Refined Consensus Model of PCK (RCM), we made a two-month quasi-experimental intervention study...

In this article, we analyse potential filters that moderate the transformation process between the realms of PCK defined in the refined consensus model of pedagogical content knowledge. We tested 58 preservice biology teachers in a 15-week one-group pretest/post-test design. To identify filters between collective PCK (cPCK) and personal PCK (pPCK),...

Video-based learning environments offer ways to include more practical insight in teacher education. The here discussed learning environment was developed to foster the diagnostic competences of pre-service biology teachers. To guarantee the most effective learning experience, learning environments can be adapted to the learner by including instruc...

Emotions are a crucial factor in daily research of academic staff and, accordingly, affect scientific progress. Already before but especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, the strong connection between working conditions and work-related emotional states as antecedents for mental health of academic staff gained more and more attention. However, in...

Zahlreiche Studien zeigen, dass die wirkungsvolle Implementierung von Innovationen davon profitiert und sich positive Effekte auf die Schüler:innen nachweisen lassen, wenn Lehrpersonen kooperieren. In vielen Fällen einer solchen Zusammenarbeit handelt es sich um professionelle Lerngemeinschaften, typischerweise bestehend aus Lehrpersonen, Schulleit...

Diagnosing is an important aspect of teachers’ professional competence. To successfully diagnose classroom situations, one has to apply pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in diagnostic activities (DA). Simulated classroom situations with embedded scaffolding can be an effective way of practising skills needed to foster diagnostic competences. In a...

Preprint available at: https://psyarxiv.com/bf92d - To advance the learning of professional practices in teacher education and medical education, this paper introduces the idea of representational scaffolding for digital simulations in higher education. We outline the ideas of core practices in two important fields of higher education, namely teach...

Biologieunterricht kriteriengeleitet zu beobachten und zu reflektieren, ist eine Kunst, die erlernt werden muss. Mit Hilfe des vorgestellten Beobachtungsbogens in Anlehnung an BARENDSEN und HENZE (2019) kann diese Fähigkeit mit dem Fokus auf fachspezifische Unterrichtsqualitätsmerkmale wie kognitive Aktivierung, Berücksichtigung des naturwissenscha...

Identifying and interpreting challenging instructional situations is important for teacher performance in the classroom, thus also for instructional quality. This project examines classroom situations in which pre-service teachers diagnose effective teaching in terms of instructional quality in the context of biology lessons. The interdisciplinary...

Since the ability to teach and therefore also diagnose not only subject-specific but also cross-domain skills are an important part of every teacher’s day-to-day work, we developed simulations to quantify and furthermore support the competence to diagnose secondary school students’ scientific reasoning skills. For this purpose, the simulations also...

Mathematical argumentations and proofs cause difficulties for secondary school students (Healy and Hoyles, 2000). Teachers’ diagnostic skills are essential for adapting their teaching to students’ specific needs in order to facilitate students’ understanding of proofs (Südkamp and Praetorius, 2017). We developed a video-based simulation to investig...

Zusammenfassung Die Frage danach, was einen guten naturwissenschaftlichen Unterricht ausmacht und die Frage, inwiefern Unterrichtsqualitätsmerkmale fachspezifisch oder generisch betrachtet werden müssen, sind grundlegende Fragestellungen mit denen sich die Unterrichtsqualitätsforschung beschäftigt. Inzwischen zeichnet sich in den Naturwissenschafts...

Unterricht objektiv zu bewerten ist essentiell in allen Phasen der Lehrkräfte(aus)bildung. Auf Basis des Schalenmodells zur Planung von Biologieunterricht und der fachspezifi schen Unterrichtsqualitätsmerkmale kognitive Aktivierung, Berücksichtigung des naturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntniswegs, sprachliches Scaffolding, angemessener Spracheinsatz wur...

Zur Erfassung und Förderung von Diagnosekompetenzen bei angehenden Biologielehrkräften wurde die videobasierte Simulationsumgebung DiKoBi entwickelt. Die Aufgaben innerhalb dieser Lernumgebung fokussiere unterschiedliche Dimensionen von biologiespezifischer Unterrichtsqualität und basieren auf dem Konzept der diagnostischen Aktivitäten. In solch ko...

Diagnosing is an important part of a teachers’ professional competence. To foster diagnostic competences of pre-service biology teachers, the video-based learning environment DiKoBi was developed. The tasks in DiKoBi focus on different biology-specific dimensions of instructional quality. In such complex learning situations, scaffolds can be an eff...

Zusammenfassung Im ersten Absatz wird die Historie der Unterrichtsqualitätsforschung aus der Perspektive der Biologiedidaktik betrachtet. Dabei wird herausgearbeitet, dass sich allgemeine Lehr-Lernforschung und Biologiedidaktik der Frage nach gutem Unterricht historisch betrachtet sehr unterschiedlich genähert haben. Während erstere gerne verschied...

In a diagnostic context of reasoning about instructional quality, scientific reasoning skills can be described as diagnostic activities, which require professional knowledge. Different approaches to enhance pre-service teachers’ professional knowledge (PCK, CK, PK), as well as diagnostic activities exist. However, results about their effectiveness...

For successful classroom instruction, teachers require a well-founded knowledge base consisting of the three knowledge facets pedagogical-psychological knowledge (PK), content knowledge (CK), and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). However, there is not yet clarity about the circumstances and instructional pathways through which teachers can best...

Research in universities and other organizations is often conducted within established disciplines that are historically based and highly arbitrary (Campbell, 2014). However, emergent phenomena fail to fit into disciplinary boundaries, making cross-disciplinary research necessary, often involving corresponding collaboration (Hall et al., 2008). On...

Dealing with student errors is a central feature of instructional quality. Teachers' reactions to a student's error and classmates' errors can be crucial to the success of a lesson. A teacher should respond appropriately in terms of motivational and learning-related issues so that the error can become a learning opportunity for students. Currently,...

Different constructs describe and analyze teachers’ diagnostic processes, in which situation-specific diagnostic skills are utilized to solve challenging situations of teaching and learning in class. This study compares two constructs—professional vision and diagnostic activities—with regard to their suitability for coding and analyzing data collec...

Vertebrate species knowledge, a key factor for conserving biodiversity, is a compulsory part of school curricula. This study evaluated the vertebrate species knowledge of sixth-grade German grammar school pupils (aged 11-13) to investigate the influence of socio-demographic factors (gender, size of hometown, mother tongue), personal expectations (f...

Teachers' diagnostic competences are essential with respect to student achievement, classroom assessment, and instructional quality. Important components of diagnostic competences are teachers' professional knowledge including content knowledge (CK), pedagogical knowledge (PK), and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), their diagnostic activities as...

Structured doctoral education is increasingly preferred compared to the individual model. Several science policy organisations give recommendations on how to structure doctoral education. However, there is little research on to what extent these recommendations find their way into practice. In our study, we first compared European and German recomm...

Forschung und Bildungspolitik haben in den vergangenen Jahren viel zu Veränderungen hinsichtlich der Planung, Gestaltung und Evaluation von Unterricht beigetragen. Gerade im Bereich der Fachdidaktiken der Naturwissenschaften und der Mediendidaktik fanden und finden intensive Bemühungen unter anderem zur Optimierung von Lehr-Lern-Prozessen statt. Zi...

Research on the development of scientific reasoning has put the main focus on children’s experimentation skills, in particular on the control-of-variables strategy. However, there are more scientific methods than just experimentation. Observation is defined as an independent scientific method that includes not only the description of what is observ...

Cognitive activation is one of the central quality characteristics of teaching. Studies which analyzed cognitive activation in science instruction and its influence on the achievement and the interest of students, took most of the times place in higher grades. Since scientific thinking can be taught at a very early stage and, in particular, experim...

Will man Lehrkräfte systematisch dabei unterstützen, digitale Medien lernförderlich im Unterricht einzusetzen, benötigt man ein Modell medienbezogener Kompetenzen von Lehrkräften. Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt das Rahmenmodell „Kernkompetenzen von Lehrkräften für das Unterrichten in einer digitalisierten Welt“ (DCB, 2017) vor, welches sich im Verg...

The German National Education Standards (NES) for biology were introduced in 2005. The content part of the NES emphasizes fostering conceptual knowledge. However, there are hardly any indications of what such an instructional implementation could look like. We introduce a theoretical framework of an instructional approach to foster students’ concep...

A key challenge for teachers is the evaluation of teaching and learning situations in the classroom. Video-based instruments are considered as effective tools for measuring teachers’ skills for evaluating classroom situations. This article reports the development and validation of a video-based assessment tool for measuring biology teachers’ profes...

We propose a conceptual framework which may guide research on fostering diagnostic competences in simulations in higher education. We first review and link research perspectives on the components and the development of diagnostic competences, taken from medical and teacher education. Applying conceptual knowledge in diagnostic activities is conside...

A number of studies on single instructional quality features have been reported for mathematics and science instruction. For summarizing single instructional quality features, researchers have created a model of three basic dimensions (classroom management, supportive climate, and cognitive activation) of instructional quality mainly through observ...

Mit den Bildungsstandards für die naturwissenschaftlichen Fächer Biologie, Chemie und Physik wurden Basiskonzepte eingeführt. Darüber, wie mit diesen Basiskonzepten im Biologieunterricht umgegangen werden soll, ist man sich noch uneins. Erste Ergebnisse aus korrelativen Video- und Interventionsstudien zeigen positive Effekte eines konzeptorientiert...

Das Leistungsniveau von Schüler*innen in den naturwissenschaftlichen Fächern ist abhängig von deren bildungssprachlichen Fähigkeiten, welche im Unterricht jedoch nicht explizit gefördert, sondern im Gegenteil als vorhanden vorausgesetzt werden. Dadurch entsteht eine Schieflage, da die Zugangsvoraussetzungen zu Bildungssprache für unterschiedliche S...

MINT-Fächern wird ein hohes Nutzungspotenzial digitaler Medien zugeschrieben, da nicht sichtbare, funktionale Strukturen und komplexe Prozesse besser nachvollziehbar werden. Das eigenverantwortliche Nutzen und die selbstständige Auseinandersetzung der Lernenden mit dem Medium und dem Lerninhalt werden als sinnvoll für den Lernprozess angesehen. Der...

Educational standards and instructional frameworks aim to foster students’ scientific literacy, especially their conceptual knowledge. Previous research has examined several instructional approaches to foster students’ conceptual learning. Reliable and adequate use of technical terms in science instruction is also essential for fostering students’...

To obtain a general understanding of science, model use as part of National Education Standards is important for instruction. Model use can be characterized by three aspects: (1) the characteristics of the model, (2) the integration of the model into instruction, and (3) the use of models to foster scientific reasoning. However, there were no empir...

Dieses Poster wurde im Rahmen der Frühjahrsschule 2019 der Biologie-Didaktik an der Universität Bonn ausgestellt und fasst die Befunde unserer BISA Studie zusammen, die unter GERL, T.; ALMER, J.; ZAHNER, V.; NEUHAUS, B. (2018): Der BISA -Test: Ermittlung der Formenkenntnis von Schülerinnen und Schülern am Beispiel einheimischer Vogelarten. Zeitsc...

Fachliches Lernen hat sich über allen historischen Wandel als ein festes Prinzip in der Schule etabliert (Huber 2001). Ein bestimmter Fächerkanon aus sprachlich-literarischen, historisch-sozialen, mathematisch-naturwissenschaftlichen und ästhetisch-künstlerischen Fächern gilt als zeitlich besonders stabil (Tenorth 1994). Die Sinnhaftigkeit des fach...

Zusammenfassung. Beobachten ist eine zentrale wissenschaftliche Erkenntnismethode, die gerade für Vorschulkinder einen guten Einstieg in naturwissenschaftliches Lernen bietet ( de Bóo, 2006 ; Johnston, 2009 ; Kohlhauf, 2013 ). Da biologische Förderung im Vorschulbereich bisher meist unsystematisch abläuft ( Kohlhauf, 2013 ), war es Ziel der hier be...

Professional knowledge is highlighted as an important prerequisite of both medical doctors and teachers. Based on recent conceptions of professional knowledge in these fields, knowledge can be differentiated within several aspects. However, these knowledge aspects are currently conceptualized differently across different domains and projects. Thus,...

Der Rückgang der Biodiversität gilt nach Aussage der Weltbank als eine der zentralen Bedrohungen der Menschheit ähnlich dem Klimawandel. Dies ist somit nicht nur ein Experten-, sondern ein gesellschaftlich relevantes Thema. Um die Entwicklung der Artenkenntnis in den letzten 10 Jahren zu ermitteln, prüfte die vorliegende Studie die Formenkenntnis 1...

Given the globalization of science education and the different cultures between China and Germany, we tried to compare and explain the differences on teacher questions and real life instances in biology lessons between the two countries from a culture-related perspective. 22 biology teachers from China and 21 biology teachers from Germany participa...

Using three-dimensional physical models elaborately in their learning, students can develop high-level understanding of models and modeling in science, thereby attaining higher achievement. However, there are in the literature few indications of how teachers should use three-dimensional physical models in instruction and whether teachers’ professio...

We investigated biology instruction—using a generic framework of scientific reasoning and argumentation (SRA) with eight epistemic activities—on how to foster student learning in biological literacy which had not been clarified in previous studies. Our analysis of videotaped biology lessons and student achievement showed varying frequencies in usin...

Guter Unterricht bemisst sich an seiner Wirkung auf die kognitive und motivationale Entwicklung der Lernenden. Als hilfreich für die Beschreibung von gutem Unterricht haben sich die drei Basisdimensionen von Unterrichtsqualität Klassenführung (z.B. die Etablierung von Regeln und Routinen), kognitive Aktivierung (z.B. die Berücksichtigung von Ideen...

Constructing scientific explanations of natural phenomena is an important aim of science education. Explanation oriented science teaching approaches encourage learners to engage in sense-making discussions and construct the causal accounts of the phenomena under study. This article demonstrates a lesson-design model that guides biology teachers on...

Previous research defined and evaluated three basic dimensions of instructional quality: classroom management, supportive climate, and cognitive activation. This study examined their effects on students' situational interest in videotaped biology instruction from German sixth-grade classes. Additionally, we evaluated the mediating effects of cognit...

The German National Education Standards for biology describe core ideas for structuring instruction, which aim to foster students’ conceptual knowledge. This study describes Teaching Based on Core Ideas (TBCI) as an attempt to integrate core ideas into instruction based on psychological theories. Testing the effectiveness of TBCI for developing fac...

Background Education Standards highlight the importance of conceptual knowledge. Instructional tasks play a key role in biology instruction and offer learning opportunities for students. Tasks contain of a content and a demands part. Therefore, complexity and cognitive level are adequate variables to describe tasks and are assumed effective for stu...

This study investigated the effects of teachers’ use of focus questions on students’ knowledge structures and classroom teaching-learning process by re-analyzing selected data from a quasi-experimental pre-post video study (Wadouh, 2007). Focus questions are content-related anchoring questions highlighting the key content taught in individual lesso...