Adapting a self-efficacy scale to the task of teaching scientific reasoning: collecting evidence for its psychometric quality using Rasch measurement.

Besides teachers' professional knowledge, their self-efficacy is a crucial aspect in promoting students' scientific reasoning (SR). However, because no measurement instrument has yet been published that specifically refers to self-efficacy beliefs regarding the task of teaching SR, we adapted the Science Teaching Efficacy Belief Instrument (STEBI) accordingly, resulting in the Teaching Scientific Reasoning Efficacy Beliefs Instrument (TSR-EBI). While the conceptual framework of the TSR-EBI is comparable to that of the STEBI in general terms, it goes beyond it in terms of specificity, acknowledging the fact that teaching SR requires very specific knowledge and skills that are not necessarily needed to the same extent for promoting other competencies in science education.

Findings from the expert-novice paradigm on differential response behavior among multiple-choice items of a pedagogical content knowledge test - implications for test development.

Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is one core dimension of teachers' professional knowledge and comprises knowledge about conceptual ideas of learners and appropriate instructions. However, several challenges regarding the assessment of PCK are discussed in the literature: For example, PCK is a topic-specific construct and contains differentiable subdomains, which must be considered during test development. In addition, the choice of test type needs to be considered.