Global challenges and changes have an impact on education and increase the expectations of teachers. Supporting students with very different backgrounds, and navigating versatile learning environments require the teacher to be able to make evidence-based decisions in order to best support the learning of all students.  In order to best prepare teachers to meet the demands of an ever more complex profession and ensure high quality teaching, teachers need strong theoretical knowledge and a good skill of transferring it into classroom practice. Student teachers often do not see the connection between evidence-based knowledge and its value for classroom practices (Knight, 2015), which might be the case due to their lack of transferring skills. 

 The contextual model of teacher competences (Blömeke et al., 2015) describes teacher 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. In other words, teacher PID-skills are of great importance for high quality teaching (Stahnke & Blömeke, 2021) as they function like a bridge between the teacher's knowledge and the transfer of that knowledge to classroom practices. 

Finding ways to support the development of teacher PID- skills is receiving more and more attention in the field of teacher education (e.g. Kleinknecht & Gröschner, 2016; Santagata et al., 2021). PID-skills are extensively researched in the field of mathematics and natural sciences (e.g. Alwast & Vorhölter, 2022; Santagata & Yeh, 2016). However, studies that focus on supporting the development of PID-skills in the context of need-supportive teaching are lacking, even though supporting student motivation and engagement are important questions for every teacher (e.g. Reeve & Cheon, 2021). Thus this research provides a novel perspective on developing PID-skills in teacher education. Previous research has shown a lower quality of teacher education students interpretation and decision-making skills (e.g. Alwast & Vorhölter, 2022; Georg & Poom-Valickis, 2023) referring to the inability to use theoretical knowledge in reasoning and decision-making. Student teachers primarily noticed aspects connected to teacher behavior, generalized and paid attention to less-important factors connected to need-supportive teaching, and had difficulties in basing their interpretations and decisions on theoretical foundations (Georg & Poom-Valickis, 2023).  Therefore  the goal of our current study was to discover ways to support the development of student teachers´ interpretation and decision-making skills in the context of need-supportive teaching using video-based discussions. Previous research has confirmed that classroom videos are a suitable means for this purpose (e.g. Prilop et al., 2021). However, merely video-based observations are not sufficient for supporting skill development effectively (Estapa & Amador, 2023). It is important to guarantee targeted opportunities to practice theoretical reasoning and make decisions thereof through video-observations or case-studies (Santagata & Yeh, 2016; Stürmer, Königs & Seidel, 2013) and pay explicit attention to learning how to direct one´s reasoning based on noticed events (Barnhart & van Es, 2015).  

The study sought answers to the following research questions: 

1. What are the levels of interpretation and decision-making skills before and after video-reflection activities in the lecture? 

2. What are the connections between student interpretation and decision-making skills and their knowledge of need-supportive teaching strategies at the end of the course? 

The current study was carried out during a TE course, where the focal topic was Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and supporting student learning and engagement. 45 first-year Master level teacher education students participated in the study. The intervention was carried out during the autumn semester of 2023/2024. Special attention was paid to giving opportunities to practice reasoning based on the noticed aspects and focusing on connecting the theory in question to practice. During 5 seminars, students had the opportunity to reflect on and discuss the videos on their own, in small groups and in a large group setting with expert feedback with the emphasis on highlighting the most important aspects in terms of the watched video-clip or providing more theoretical insight into the offered interpretations and decisions. A supporting reflection model with guiding questions was developed to better facilitate the discussions in the lecture. The data was collected in the lectures before and after interventions. A pre-intervention evaluation of interpretation and decision-making skills was carried out at the beginning of the course before SDT, and need-supportive teaching was thoroughly discussed. Coding schemes and procedures from previous research (e.g. Alwast & Vorhölter, 2022; Barnhart & van Es, 2015; van Es, 2011) were adapted and validated to be used in the context of need-supported teaching (Georg & Poom-Valickis, 2023). For the skills assessment, two authentic classroom videos with a 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 the level of their interpretation and decision-making. A post-intervention evaluation was carried out at the end of the theoretical course following the same model. In addition to the assessment of PID-skills, participants also completed a questionnaire to analyze their theoretical knowledge regarding basic psychological needs support and thwarting in the classroom created based on Ahmadi et al. (2023). Data analysis for evaluating PID-skills was carried out in several phases. First, data was coded based on the data item describing 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; van Es, 2011). To evaluate changes in the interpretation and decision-making skills, the paired sample t-test is used and correlation analysis is carried out to find connections between student PID-skills and theoretical knowledge.

Preliminary analysis of the pre-intervention assessment shows that student teachers' interpretation and decision-making skills are of a rather low level, which corresponds to the results of the previous PID-skills assessment study (Georg & Poom-Valickis, 2023). As the second round of data collection was carried out in December 2023 the data analysis is still in progress. A preliminary look at the data does reveal a shift in the levels of interpretation and decision-making, but further deep analysis is yet to be carried out. However, there is reason to be cautiously optimistic to see a better capability of teacher education students´ providing reasoning and decisions based on theoretical knowledge. Even though the study focuses on analyzing the development of PID-skills and its connections to theoretical knowledge, it is positive to see that 82% (N=37) teacher education students who participated in the study found that video-based discussions supported or significantly supported their skills in understanding the aspects of need-supportive teaching and transferring that knowledge into practice. 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. Furthermore, the study focuses on finding opportunities for facilitating video-based discussions in lecture settings and thereby offers an important addition to teacher education course development.

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