Fostering pre-service primary school teachers’ ability to recognize differences in pupils’ understanding of technical systems

Pupils benefit from adaptive instruction and feedback from their teachers. A prerequisite for providing adaptive instruction is that teachers’ diagnostic ability enables them to correctly perceive their pupils’ skill level. A short course has been developed to improve primary school teachers’ diagnostic ability for engineering. Based on Nickerson’s anchoring and adjustment model, the participants became aware of the differences their own and pupils’ use of information when constructing technical systems. The Fischer scale was used as a model to understand and identify pupils’ development in using such information. The participants were given examples of pupils’ reconstructions of technical systems. They were asked to evaluate these work products in four ways: relative and absolute, combined with intuitive and explicit. The results reveal that relative and absolute diagnoses can differ considerably for the same teacher and between teachers, depending on whether they are implicit or explicit. Post-test results show that the course improved the ability to explain the differences between pupils’ use of information to construct a technical system. The course also had a strong, significant, positive impact on teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs about technology education.