Assessing and Promoting Professional Vision and Knowledge of Classroom Management

Classroom management is one of the main components of professional teacher knowledge.Numerous studies indicated that it is crucial for student learning. A prerequisite of effectiveclassroom management is the ability to notice and interpret classroom events that are conduciveto learning. Such a professional vision of classroom management is assumed to be a mediatorbetween propositional knowledge and successful acting in practice. The aim of the present dissertationwas to provide insights into the promotion and the assessment of professional visionand knowledge of classroom management.An initial instrument for assessing professional vision was developed to investigate effectsof a video-based training for pre-service teachers. The training included imparting theoreticalconcepts as well as video-based teaching analysis. The quasi-experimental intervention studyrevealed that professional vision was trainable: The training group showed significantly higherlearning gains than an untreated control group. This study also indicated opportunities for improvingboth the training and the video-based test.The second study addressed one of these limitations: A new video-based instrument forassessing professional vision of classroom management consisting of five video clips and accompanyingrating items was developed. Several pilot studies and a cross-validation revealedpromising psychometric properties of the test. Teachers showed a significantly higher level ofprofessional vision than pre-service teachers. A specific methodological challenge was to accountfor item dependence due to nested items within each video clip. The application of abifactor modeling approach emphasized the importance of taking item dependence of videocuedtests into account.The third study aimed at the assessment of pre-service teachers’ strategic knowledge ofclassroom management using a situational judgment approach. Results from a pilot study anda cross validation found that teachers outperformed pre-service teachers. As a limitation, poorreliability coefficients indicated that the test was only appropriate for research on group comparisonsor interindividual change.The dissertation provided new insights into the assessment of situated forms of classroommanagement knowledge and showed that video-based learning settings can enhance this knowledgewithin teacher education.