Student teachers' views of their professional competence before leaving teacher education. Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, September 25-26, Vienna, Austria

Mostly teacher competence is strongly associated with teaching, in spite of the fact that modern teachers’ every-day activity shows there exists a long list of other activities and responsibilities to be included in teachers’ normal routines. Evidently teaching competence cannot be sufficient as qualification and even if it is, a major problem is to define what it is. For one thing, for any teacher education, it must be assumed that the students will increase their teacher competence as an effect of their teacher education. This must include self-efficacy dimension in the sense, that each student teacher at the end of the teacher education should have a feeling of being competent as a teacher. It can therefore be assumed that first semester student teachers differ from those in their final semester regarding their experienced competencies. This topic is outlined and discussed along with findings from a questionnaire study investigating student teachers’ feelings of competence and professional control. The questionnaire contained 65 Likert-scale items covering several topics related to teacher competence and teachers’ everyday work. The participating student teachers were recruited from several local teacher educations in Sweden. Their responses were analyzed statistically. In the paper the outcome is presented and discussed.