Studies on Freshman Science Student Teachers' Beliefs about Science Teaching and Learning

The present dissertation focuses as a case on freshman Science student teachers` beliefs about teaching and learning science from four German universities. The studies focus an overall consideration but also differentiations between student teachers` beliefs from secondary Chemistry, Biology and Physics teaching, as well as from Primary Science education. The work is a collection of different qualitative and quantitative studies and an approach towards their integration in a Mixed-Methods-Design.

In the qualitative part of the dissertation, freshman Science student teachers` Beliefs about Classroom Organisation, Beliefs about Teaching Objectives and Epistemological Beliefs in the Natural Sciences are evaluated. This part made use of the idea of analysing student teachers' drawings about themselves as a teacher in class. In a pilot study, an instrument and evaluation pattern was developed by Grounded Theory. This instrument was applied to a sample of 284 student teachers from the four science teaching domains. In the quantitative part, information was collected from the same sample as in the qualitative main study about student teachers` Curricular Beliefs, Beliefs about the Nature of Science and about the Nature of School Science. Here different Likert-type questionnaires were used. Finally, an integration of the data from all the four qualitative and quantitative studies is discussed in the means of a Mixed Methods approach. The integration was made on the basis of the calculation of empirical quantiles.