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Do Practical and Academic Preparation Paths Lead to Differential Commercial Teacher “Quality”?

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Abstract

The Swiss teacher education and training system offers a practically and academically oriented path for aspiring commercial vocational education and training (VET) teachers. Although teachers’ content knowledge (CK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) are considered crucial for teaching quality and students’ achievement, little is known about Swiss VET teachers’ Economics CK and PCK. Using assessments of teachers’ economics CK and PCK as proxies of “quality” we found that teachers regardless of practical or academic preparation were similar in CK and PCK once in the teaching profession. This finding contradicts popular belief that academic preparation with its selectivity and education would produce higher quality teachers.

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Notes

  1. The TUCE was successfully translated, adapted, and validated in the project Modeling and measuring competencies in business and economics among students and graduates by adapting and further developing existing American and Latin-American measuring instruments (EGEL/TUCE), funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. For more information, see: http://www.wiwi-kompetenz.de/eng/index.php (Accessed 4 May 2018).

  2. Compare also Kuhn et al. (2016) for applying validity criteria while developing a test.

  3. Several classes were taught by two teachers.

  4. Christian Ganser and Anna Osenbrück participated in developing the biographical questionnaire.

  5. Used with permission. WiwiKom-Test. Copyright© 2014 JGU Mainz, FB 03, Wirtschaftspädagogik 1,

    Mainz. All rights reserved. For more information, see http://www.wipaed.uni-mainz.de/ls/1085_DEU_HTML.php

  6. Only two items were available for one of the six microeconomic content categories.

  7. Kuhn et al. (2016, p. 9) applied four parts for constructing PCK items.

  8. For MiCK and MaCK, we replicated the aforementioned two-dimensional structure of Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia et al. (2015) in a CFA manner. By including PCK, the CFA had an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) character.

  9. The COACTIV project used a similar procedure with PCK subscales and CK parcels (Krauss et al. 2008b).

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Acknowledgements

The research was supported by the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) as part of the Leading House project ‘Learning and Instruction for Commercial Apprentices (LINCA)’ and the Aebli-Näf-Foundation in Switzerland. We thank Prof. Dr. Jürgen Seifried, Dr. Stefanie Findeisen, and Sabine Fritsch for their input during the PCK item development. We are grateful to Dr. Sebastian Brückner and Prof. Dr. Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia from the WiwiKom-project at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz for their support during the application of the German TUCE translation and adaptation in LINCA. Special thanks go to Dr. Urs Grob and Dr. Fabio Sticca for their feedback during data analysis. We thank Prof. Dr. Franz Eberle for his feedback during writing this paper. Last but not least, the authors would like to thank all study participants. Additional thanks go to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

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Holtsch, D., Hartig, J. & Shavelson, R. Do Practical and Academic Preparation Paths Lead to Differential Commercial Teacher “Quality”?. Vocations and Learning 12, 23–46 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12186-018-9208-0

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