Investigating the development of analytical skills in teacher education

An important part of teacher competence is to analyze complex classroom situations and to suggest appropriate actions that follow from the analysis. Novice teachers’ analyses are, however, typically simpler than analyses made by experienced teachers. The aim of this study was to investigate whether the analytical skills of preservice teachers had developed throughout teacher education, and whether the pattern of strengths and weaknesses in students’ performances during their first semester had changed at the time of graduation. The results show that the skills did not improve during teacher education, since the students performed at the same level during the first and the last semester. Only two changes where identified: (1) The students had increased their awareness about the need to have more information before being able to make well-grounded decisions; (2) The students considered different motives for acting in particular ways to a lesser extent during the last semester.