Forscher der Universität Augsburg und der Universität des Saarlandes zeigen Unterschiede zwischen den Entscheidungsprozessen zwischen Referendariaten, Lehren und Erziehungswissenschaftlern. Der Zoomvortrag ist Teil des Psychologischen Fachkolloquiums.

(Future) teachers are increasingly asked to base their classroom-related decisions on evidence derived from educational research. However, research suggests that pre-service teachers rarely follow a structured reasoning process and rather refer to experiential than to scientific knowledge when being confronted with problematic classrooms situations. Thus, it seems necessary to prepare pre-service teachers to successfully reason about classroom-related challenges. We argue that such an intervention should not only be informed by normative reasoning models, but also by comparative research that contrasts pre-service teachers’ reasoning with that of experienced in-service teachers and educational researchers. A comparison of pre- and in-service teachers might illustrate the trajectory that pre-service teachers are assumed to take without any distinctive reasoning-related intervention. Contrasting pre-service teachers and educational researchers might indicate the maximally to be expected development of pre-service teachers. Therefore, we asked N = 55 pre-service teachers, in-service teachers and educational researchers to think aloud about a written classroom scenario and participate in a retrospective interview directed at their reasoning processes. With regard to the reasoning processes, group comparisons showed that educational researchers only differed from pre- and in-service teachers in their degree to which they categorized significant instances in the case description. However, differences regarding their references to scientific and experiential knowledge were much more pronounced: Educational researchers significantly more often referred to scientific knowledge and significantly less often to experiential knowledge than pre- and in-service teachers. These quantitative results will be complemented with qualitative analyses from participants from each of the three groups. Finally, we will discuss implications for the design of interventions directed at supporting pre-service teachers’ evidence-informed reasoning.