Measuring Preservice Teachers' Competencies Regarding Linguistically Diverse Classrooms in Germany: Test Development and Its Validation

• In Event: 72.040 - International Perspectives on Teacher Preparation for Second Language Learners

Abstract

Objectives: The inequality regarding students with a second language in content classrooms and their need to be appropriately facilitated leads to the need for substantial research on the necessary professional competencies of pre-service teachers in the field of L2 teaching in the mainstream classroom. On both a national as well as on an international level there is a want of an empirical basis for the design of learning opportunities (e.g., Lucas & Grinberg, 2008; Schleppegrell, 2004; Ohm, 2009). To address this research deficit our project developed a test instrument to measure pre-service teacher’s competencies. Thus our research questions are: Is the developed test instrument able to measure competencies regarding linguistically diverse students? How does the test instrument correlate with external criteria and with the amount of learning opportunities?

Conceptual Framework: In this study we developed a theoretical framework for German as a second language teaching competencies (GSL-TC) that consists of three content dimensions: (1) subject-specific registers, (2) multilingualism, and (3) didactics. Based on this framework, a test instrument was developed in order to accurately assess pre-service teachers’ competencies on the basis of scaled test items and to investigate the construct’s dimensional structure. Mathematics was chosen as the reference subject, orienting at studies like Mathematics Teaching in the 21st Century (MT21; Schmidt et al., 2007) and Teacher Education and Development Study: Learning to Teach Mathematics (TEDS-M; Blömeke & Kaiser, 2014). A standard setting with experts of the field defined minimal and optimal teacher competencies regarding linguistically diverse students.

Methods and Data Sources: The paper and pencil test consists of 68 items. The items require analyzing authentic student-teacher-interactions, case studies and potentially linguistically difficult textbook exercises. The GSL-TC test instrument was tested on a sample of N = 252 pre-service teachers. Additionally, the test persons completed tests on pedagogical knowledge, linguistic knowledge and mathematical content knowledge to investigate how the GSL-TC test results relate with external criteria. In addition a questionnaire was conducted about learning opportunities. The item and scale analyses were conducted on the basis of the Rasch IRT model through the program ConQuest (Adams, Wilson & Wu, 2006).

Results: The results of a Rasch scaling showed good measurement properties for the test. Concerning the construct’s dimensionality, we found that a unidimensional model fits the data better than a three-dimensional model. Our expectations concerning the correlations were confirmed. The results show significant correlations between the GSL-TC test scores and the test scores for the pedagogical knowledge in the subdimension Dealing with Heterogeneity (r = .21), linguistic knowledge (r = .25) and an index of learning opportunities regarding second language learning (r = .17). As expected we did not find correlations with mathematical content knowledge.

Scholarly Significance:
The designed test instrument gives the opportunity to do further research on appropriate learning opportunities for pre-service teachers to reach the defined standards. It therefore can make an important contribution towards more justice in teaching linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms in Germany and internationally through continued research and translation.

Authors

• Timo Ehmke, Leuphana University - Lueneburg

• Svenja Hammer, Leuphana Universitat Luneburg