ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Teacher Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1668962
This article is part of the Research TopicUse(fullness) of educational sciences in teacher education – what it is and what it is for?View all 4 articles
Reflecting on teaching together and alone: Preservice teachers' processes of knowledge construction in writing and discussion
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Münster, Münster, Germany
- 2University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany
- 3DIPF Leibniz-Institut fur Bildungsforschung und Bildungsinformation, Frankfurt, Germany
- 4Färberei e.V., Wuppertal, Germany
- 5Bergische Universitat Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany
- 6Montclair State University, Montclair, United States
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Understanding how preservice teachers (PSTs) engage with knowledge of educational sciences through reflective practice is critical to improving teacher education. This study investigates how PSTs construct knowledge when analyzing a complex classroom situation and explores how reflective task format—individual essay writing or collaborative group discussion—shapes the types and quality of knowledge construction processes involved. Drawing on frameworks of reflective practice and epistemic cognition, we developed a coding scheme to identify five knowledge construction processes and three levels of implementation quality. Using data from a university-based teacher education course, we applied this scheme to PSTs' written essays and transcribed group discussions. Our findings indicate that collaborative discussions elicited a broader variety of knowledge construction processes and deeper levels of implementation, while essays involved more references to scientific literature but fewer exploratory hypotheses. These results suggest that different reflective tasks afford distinct opportunities for preservice teachers to mobilize and integrate educational sciences knowledge. The study highlights how the perceived relevance and applicability of theoretical content are shaped not only by individual cognition but also by the task design and social context of reflection. Implications for teacher educators include selecting reflection formats strategically to support meaningful engagement with educational knowledge in preparation for complex pedagogical reasoning.
Keywords: Teacher Education, Preservice teachers, reflective practice, Epistemic cognition, knowledge construction, Pedagogical reasoning, Teacher reflection, professional judgment
Received: 18 Jul 2025; Accepted: 01 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kindlinger, Hartmann, Trempler, Molitor and Fives. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Marcus Kindlinger, marcus.kindlinger@uni-muenster.de
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