The relevance of preservice teachers’ declarative content knowledge and professional role identity for a lesson planning task close to professional demands

Teachers' knowledge seems to be important for student learning, however, it is a complex issue. Therefore recent studies have emphasized the importance of examining how teachers use their knowledge in teaching situations. Previous research has found that Geography preservice teachers responded to a text vignette, an instrument that simulates a teaching situation, predominantly with pedagogical thoughts, followed by pedagogical content thoughts but rarely with exclusively content thoughts. This study sheds light on such findings by examining preservice teachers' content knowledge and professional role identity. Preservice teachers participated in a content knowledge test on the tropical rainforest topic and assessed their professional role identity on a well-established percent point index. The results from the previous study were then correlated with the declarative knowledge test and the professional role identity in this study. The findings indicated that preservice teachers possess limited content knowledge; however, they did not express it to the same extent when working on the vignette. Furthermore, the study revealed moderate correlations between the preservice teachers' professional role identity and their responses to the vignette, evidence of the significant influence of professional role identity on teaching.