Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Confidence in and Valuing of Psychological Findings Among Preservice Teachers

Confidence in and Valuing of Psychological Findings Among Preservice Teachers BackgroundTeachers’ perception of psychology is of importance because they get in contact with psychology as a scientific discipline and should apply (educational) psychological findings. This requires a generally positive attitude toward corresponding findings, which should be fostered during teacher education.ObjectiveThe goal of this study was to examine preservice teachers’ perception of findings from psychology in general and educational psychology in particular, thereby differentiating between confidence in and valuing of the same.MethodTwo subsamples of n = 937 German preservice teachers and n = 310 psychology majors participated in an online survey.ResultsCompared with natural science disciplines or another “harder” psychological subdiscipline, preservice teachers perceived psychology as less scientific, and judged findings from psychology and educational psychology to be less credible but more valuable. While both confidence in and valuing of findings from psychology were higher among psychology majors than among preservice teachers, the opposite was true for educational psychology. However, all differences were rather small.ConclusionWe conclude that preservice teachers’ perception of (educational) psychology is not alarmingly poor.Teaching ImplicationsThe high valuing of scientific findings from (educational) psychology could be used to also foster a broader reliance on scientific findings (examples are discussed). http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Teaching of Psychology SAGE

Confidence in and Valuing of Psychological Findings Among Preservice Teachers

Seifried, Eva; Menz, Cordelia; Spinath, Birgit
Teaching of Psychology , Volume 51 (1): 13 – Jan 1, 2024
Download PDF
13 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/sage/confidence-in-and-valuing-of-psychological-findings-among-preservice-0aL4LBA3zY

References (54)

Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2022
ISSN
0098-6283
eISSN
1532-8023
DOI
10.1177/00986283211058835
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

BackgroundTeachers’ perception of psychology is of importance because they get in contact with psychology as a scientific discipline and should apply (educational) psychological findings. This requires a generally positive attitude toward corresponding findings, which should be fostered during teacher education.ObjectiveThe goal of this study was to examine preservice teachers’ perception of findings from psychology in general and educational psychology in particular, thereby differentiating between confidence in and valuing of the same.MethodTwo subsamples of n = 937 German preservice teachers and n = 310 psychology majors participated in an online survey.ResultsCompared with natural science disciplines or another “harder” psychological subdiscipline, preservice teachers perceived psychology as less scientific, and judged findings from psychology and educational psychology to be less credible but more valuable. While both confidence in and valuing of findings from psychology were higher among psychology majors than among preservice teachers, the opposite was true for educational psychology. However, all differences were rather small.ConclusionWe conclude that preservice teachers’ perception of (educational) psychology is not alarmingly poor.Teaching ImplicationsThe high valuing of scientific findings from (educational) psychology could be used to also foster a broader reliance on scientific findings (examples are discussed).

Journal

Teaching of Psychology – SAGE

Published: Jan 1, 2024

Keywords: confidence in scientific findings; educational psychology; perception of sciences; preservice teachers; psychology; valuing of scientific findings

There are no references for this article.