Pre-service Teachers’ Perception of Competence, Social Relatedness, and Autonomy in a Flipped Classroom: Effects on Learning to Notice Student Preconceptions

Science teachers should be able to notice student preconceptions in order to adapt instructions to their students’ needs and support the learning process. Noticing as a core practice of teaching should thus be implemented early in science teacher education. A crucial prerequisite for noticing is knowledge about students’ preconceptions, which is an important element of science teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge. To enhance pre-service teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge, flipped classroom approaches seem especially promising as they combine a theoretical introduction to important didactic concepts with a direct application of these concepts in profession-oriented learning tasks. Furthermore, flipped classrooms seem to satisfy the three basic personal needs of experience in competence, social relatedness, and autonomy according to the self-determination theory of motivation, thus enhancing learning. This intervention study investigates the effect of a course on physics didactics designed according to the flipped classroom approach on pre-service teachers’ (N = 87) learning to notice student preconceptions. Specifically, we analyzed how pre-service teachers’ perception of competence, social relatedness, and autonomy during course participation related to their noticing abilities. We found a significant increase (d = 0.40) in PSTs’ noticing abilities, operationalized as absolute number of recognized preconceptions between pre- and posttest. However, this increase was not mediated by PSTs’ perception of competence, social relatedness, and autonomy.