Who Is More Competent in Using Research – In-service or Pre-service Teachers? An example from Austria

• In Event: Using Research Evidence to Inform Educational Practice: Exploring Teachers’ Skill and Will to Do So

Abstract

Despite the global movement toward accountability, evaluation, and assessment in education (DeLuca & Johnson, 2017) and the importance of educational practitioners’ competence in the engagement with and the use of research, the state of knowledge about the actual competency levels is unsatisfactory – not only in German-speaking countries like Austria.
However, there is some evidence that only a minority of German teacher education students is able to critically evaluate research-related conclusions, whereas in-service teachers show, at best, medium, but lower competencies to use research compared to student teachers (e.g., Kittel et al., 2017). Even approaches to develop the capacity of school leaders and practitioners to engage in reflective problem solving – for example Research Learning Networks or Data Teams – seem to fail in their attempts to facilitate research-informed decision making, too (Brown et al., 2017).
In recent history, Austria was faced with an empirical shift in its education system after disappointing results in international large-scale assessments in the early 2000s. In 2010, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research and the Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture published an expertise on the future of pedagogical professions, which expressed the recommendation that research needs to be established as a constitutive element of teacher education. Further reforms followed in 2013, like that all teacher education students must obtain an academic degree (bachelor’s or master’s degree), and the establishment of so-called development clusters in which the more research-oriented universities and the more practice-oriented university colleges of teacher education (UE) are required to collaborate in the field of teacher education. Against this backdrop, this presentation is dedicated to the question of how competent Austrian teachers are in the use of research and to what extent there are differences between teacher training students and in-service teachers, the majority of whom were presumably still trained in the "old" system.
Analyses are based on Study 1 at two Austrian UE in the summer semester of 2015 (N = 295), and Study 2 at local Austrian schools (N = 141) in 2024. Research competence was assessed via a standardized test, and the data was analyzed based on probabilistic modeling (1PL: EAP reliability = .53; R2 = .49) with the person estimates reported on the logit scale (WLE). Results indicate that on average, the study participants could not answer quite half of the test questions correctly. Furthermore, particularly the in-service teachers demonstrated significantly lower research competence than the teacher training students (F (1, 434) = 12.261; p < .001; η2 = .027).
This highlights that it is essential to gain as representative a picture as possible of the research-related competences in-service teachers actually have, as it is key to evidence-based reforms in education (Altrichter, 2019). But there is reason for hope, too, as the teacher training students only attended introductory research courses, but still seem to have benefited from it. This in turn can be interpreted as an indication that research-based initial and continuing teacher training can contribute to improving the competence in the engagement with and the use of research.

Authors

• Jana Groß Ophoff, University College of Teacher Education Vorarlberg

• Jonas Pfurtscheller, University College of Teacher Education Vorarlberg

• Laurin Brandt, University College of Teacher Education Vorarlberg