Educational Expertise

Currently, educational research which is characterized by many weak and inconsistent results seems to be of little relevance for school psychologists. This is especially problematic if primary prevention is considered as a major goal of school psychology. In our opinion, an important step towards closing the gap between educational research and classroom practice could be made by integrating two theoretical positions: a master or expert teacher approach and the concept of a general teaching model, i.e. by reconciling an analytical strategy based on functional relationships between variables with a more holistic approach to teacher behavior. The integration of the two approaches into the concept of teaching expertise is demonstrated by the analysis of two causal models in which different knowledge components derived from research on the expert-novice paradigm are linked to the variables traditionally used in research on teaching.