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Department of Educational Sciences and Psychology

Practice note: Quality subject teaching

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Beispielhafte Erhebungsfragen des Projekts TIMSS © IFS​/​TU Dortmund
High-quality subject-specific teaching is considered a significant prerequisite for successful learning at school. How can elementary school teachers ensure subject-specific teaching quality in their mathematics or science-related subject lessons? The article "The subject-specific view of instructional design in elementary school" presents important findings on the conceptualization of subject-specific instructional quality characteristics and offers a practically applicable self-assessment questionnaire for teachers.

Subject-specific aspects of instructional quality play an important role in student learning alongside the basic dimensions of classroom management, cognitive activation, and constructive support. For example, the subject-specific perspective on instructional quality takes greater account to the promotion of significant key competencies and content areas to be learned in the respective domain. In the article "The subject-specific perspective on instructional design in elementary school", the question of which design features characterize high-quality subject instruction in the STEM area of the fourth grade is explored. In addition to explanations of the conceptualization of the instruments used to capture these quality features in TIMSS 2019, teachers are provided with a practical self-assessment questionnaire for classroom evaluation. Elementary school teachers can thus gain important information about the quality of their subject teaching in mathematics and science.