In order to best prepare teachers to meet the demands of a complex profession, teachers need the skills to transfer their theoretical knowledge into classroom practice. The gap between theory and practice has been a well documented issue in teacher education, where student teachers often do not see the connection between evidence-based knowledge and its value for classroom practices (Knight, 2015). 

The contextual model of teacher competences (Blömeke et al., 2015) describes competence as a multidimensional construct, which consists of three facets: teachers' disposition (professional knowledge and affective-motivational aspects), situation-specific skills (perception, interpretation, decision-making, i.e PID-skills) and performance in the classroom. These three facets are in interaction with each other, where dispositions affect PID-skills and the visible behaviour in the classroom is dependent on both two. Teacher PID-skills are of great importance for high quality teaching (Stahnke & Blömeke, 2021), functioning like a bridge between the teacher's knowledge and the transfer of that knowledge to classroom practices. In perceiving classroom events, it has been documented that novice teachers tend to focus more on the teacher (Santagata & Yeh, 2016; Stahnke & Blömeke, 2021),  generalize too broadly and notice less important aspects influencing student learning (Barnhart & van Es, 2015) and their perception is less detailed (Gibson & Ross, 2016). Interpretation and decision-making skills describe the skills of using existing knowledge in making sense of the perceived classroom instances and connecting them to theoretical knowledge and making decisions based thereof (Alwast & Vorhölter, 2022). Pre-service teachers' interpretation and decision-making skills are found to be described by lower quality (e.g. Alwast & Vorhölter, 2022), which mainly means the inability to use theoretical knowledge in reasoning or decision-making.

In autumn 2022, Tallinn University's first year Master level teacher education students' level of PID-skills in the context of need- supportive teaching was evaluated. The results of the study revealed similar findings to previous studies in the field (e.g. Alwast & Vorhölter; Barnhart & van Es, 2015; Stahnke & Blömeke, 2021). Knowing that experience and time alone do not guarantee the development of PID-skills (Santagata & Yeh, 2016) and that explicit attention needs to be paid to learning how to direct one's perception and reasoning based on noticed events (Barnhart & van Es, 2015)  gave an indication that student teachers PID-skills in the context of need-supportive teaching need to be better supported during teacher education. This formed the basis for the current study, where the goal was to find ways to support the development of teacher PID-skills for need-supportive teaching in one teacher education (TE) course. Previous research has confirmed that classroom videos are a suitable means for this purpose (e.g. Prilop et al., 2021), bearing in mind that it is important to guarantee targeted opportunities to practice theoretical reasoning and making decisions thereof (Santagata & Yeh, 2016). An intervention was carried out as part of the study with the goal of painting a clearer picture to the student teachers of how to connect theory to classroom events, as well as to improve their understanding of their own reasonings and the extent they are able to transfer theoretical knowledge to practice.

The aim of the study is to determine the extent video-based reflection and analysis tasks that focus explicitly on offering possibilities to practice perception, interpretation and decision-making help to develop student teachers' PID-skills in the context of need-supportive teaching.  The study seeks to find answers to the following questions:

1. What kind of changes occurred in the student teachers PID-skills during the teacher education course?

2. To what extent do the results of the experimental group differ from the results of the control group?

The current study consisted of a control and experimental group. The study was carried out during a TE course, where the focal topic self-determination theory (SDT) and supporting student learning and engagement. Pre-intervention evaluation of PID-skills was carried out at the beginning of the course before SDT and need-supportive teaching was thoroughly discussed. The assessment instrument was created based on previously validated instruments (Alwast & Vorhölter, 2022; Barnhart & van Es, 2015; Chan & Yau, 2021; Kersting, 2008; van Es, 2011). Two authentic classroom videos with the length of 5-minutes each were shown to the participants, which they had to analyze based on given prompts. The analysis questions were formulated based on Chan & Yau (2021) and enabled to assess, which aspects student teachers noticed and what was the level of their interpretation and decision-making. Data analysis was carried out in several phases. First, data was coded based on the data item describing perception, interpretation or decision-making. In the next phase, data was analyzed deductively, using coding protocols, which were created on the basis of previous research (Alwast & Vorhölter, 2022; Kersting, 2008; van Es, 2011). Categories to assess perception were created based on SDT (Jang et al., 2010). Post-intervention evaluation was carried out at the end of the theoretical course following the same model. The control group and experimental group both consisted of about 20 students who participated in the study. In the experimental group, special attention was paid to giving opportunities to practice noticing need-supportive teaching using video-clips of classroom interactions, reasoning based on the noticed aspects and focusing on connecting the theory in question to the reasonings and decisions. Over the course of 5 seminars, students were given the opportunity to reflect on the videos on their own and in small groups. Each task was followed by a feedback and discussion session with the lecturer with the emphasis of highlighting the most important aspects in terms of the watched video-clip or providing more theoretical insight into the offered interpretations and decisions.

Initial evaluation of student teacher PID-skills was carried out in September 2022. The results revealed that the participants were able to notice noteworthy aspects of the classroom (van Es, 2011) illustrated by the fact that the overwhelming majority of the noticed aspects were connected to need-supportive teaching. However, student teachers' results did show the same characteristics as found in other studies, where their noticings were too generalized, teacher focused or not detailed enough (Barnhart & van Es, 2015; Gibson & Ross, 2016; Santagata & Yeh, 2016). In terms of interpretation and decision-making, the results indicated a low level of skills, as the majority of data items were categorized on the lowest level of a 3-level evaluation model. These results indicated that student teachers were not able to connect theoretical knowledge to their reasoning and decision-making. The intervention was carried out during November - December 2022 and the second round of data collection was carried out in December 2022. Data from the post-course evaluation is currently being analyzed, but the outcomes are expected to indicate a clear increase in PID-skills for the experimental group. The expected outcomes of this study provide an important insight into finding solutions to better support theory-practice transferability in teacher education, in order to ensure the implementation of evidence-based knowledge in supporting student learning and engagement. So far, PID-skills are researched to a large extent in the field of mathematics and natural sciences (e.g. Alwast & Vorhölter, 2022; Kersting 2008; Santagata & Yeh, 2016). Studies that focus on supporting the development of PID-skills in the context of need-supportive teaching are lacking, and therefore, this research provides a novel perspective for the topic of developing PID-skills in teacher education.

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