Development of preservice science teachers’ reflection skills: does reflecting on one’s own or other people’s instructional explanations lead to different developments?

Teachers’ reflection skills are crucial to their professional knowledge, yet research in this area, particularly among chemistry educators, remains sparse. Little is known about how teachers plan, teach, and reflect on science teaching in chemistry education. Also, promoting and developing reflection skills over more than three measurement points could be important for designing lessons and seminars. This research project will address these research gaps by developing a university seminar in which students plan, teach, observe, and then reflect on short teaching situations. The preservice science teachers reflected on the adaptive explanation of experiments, a chemistry specialty. Since both observed and self-conducted lessons can lead to higher reflection skills, differences in the development between these two conditions are investigated in an intervention study using a linear mixed model (LMM). The main results are that the developed university seminar can significantly promote the reflection skills of both Teachers and Observers. There are indications that the ability to reflect develops at different rates in the two groups. This study suggests that reflection abilities are related to professionalising individual sub-facets of preservice science teachers’ adaptive explaining skills in planning situations.