Prospective teachers must acquire subject-specific digital competencies to design contemporary lessons and to promote digital competencies among students themselves. The DiKoLAN framework (Digital Competencies for Teaching in Science Education) describes basic digital competencies for the teaching profession in the natural sciences precisely for this purpose. In this article, we describe the development, implementation, and evaluation of a university course based on DiKoLAN which promotes the digital competencies of science teachers. As an example, the learning module Data Processing in Science Education is presented, and its effectiveness is investigated. For this purpose, we used a questionnaire developed by the Working Group Digital Core Competencies to measure self-efficacy, which can also be used in the future to promote digital competencies among pre-service teachers. The course evaluation showed a positive increase in the students’ self-efficacy expectations. Overall, the paper thus contributes to teacher education by using the course as a best-practice example—a blueprint for designing new courses and for implementing a test instrument for a valid evaluation.

Augmented reality (AR) is vital in education for enhancing learning and motivation through interactive environments and experiments. This requires teacher training in AR creation and integration. Research indicates that learning effectiveness relies on thorough preparation, calling for the development of scoring rubrics for evaluating both educational AR and AR’s educational integration. However, no current studies provide such a rubric for assessing AR’s pedagogical implementation. Hence, a scoring rubric, EVAR (Evaluating Augmented Reality in Education), was developed based on the framework for the analysis and development of augmented reality in science and engineering teaching by Czok and colleagues, and extended with core concepts of instructional design and lesson organization, featuring 18 items in five subscales rated on a four-point Likert scale. To evaluate the validity and reliability of the scoring rubric, AR learning scenarios, designed by eleven master’s seminar pre-service teacher students at the University of Konstanz, majoring in biology, chemistry, or physics, were assessed by five AR experts using the newly developed scoring rubric. The results reveal that a simple classification of AR characteristics is insufficient for evaluating its pedagogical quality in learning scenarios. Instead, the newly developed scoring rubric for evaluating AR in educational settings showed high inter-rater reliability and can discriminate between different groups according to the educational quality of the AR and the implementation of AR into lesson planning.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed higher education radically and challenged faculties to adapt their teaching to the new circumstances. The aim of this study is to highlight changes, in particular, the advantages and disadvantages associated with them, and to find out what conclusions were drawn for the future in the three experimental natural sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics at the University of Konstanz (Germany). In a guided interview, the majority of the university teachers in the bachelor’s programs were interviewed, and their statements were subsequently categorized. While lectures and tutorials in distance learning were held asynchronously or synchronously online, laboratory courses used a variety of formats. The number of disadvantages cited, as well as the number of university faculty citing the same disadvantage, is greater than for advantages. The most commonly cited drawbacks fall into the areas of workload, communication, feedback, and active student participation. Physical presence and a return to the original learning objectives in the lab courses is wanted by the majority. The results point to commonalities between the science subjects and should encourage science departments to work together on similar problems in similar formats in the future. Furthermore, there is an urgent and ongoing need for the training of natural science teachers in competence-oriented digital teaching.

This study examines the development of pre-experiences with digital media at school and in university, creating and entertainment-oriented media use and attitudes towards digital media in the classroom among students in the first three years of study, particularly those enrolled in science courses, in times of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a questionnaire adapted from Vogelsang et al. scales were calculated and PERMANOVAs, Kruskal-Wallis tests and post-hoc Dunn tests done shedding light on the influence of graduation year and semester of study as well as the difference between the current cohort and a pre-pandemic one. Results revealed significant shifts in digital experiences, particularly among students who were still attending school during the pandemic. Compared to colleagues without school experience during the pandemic, they showed a more frequent use of digital media for communication and collaboration. Moreover, a discernible trend of increasing digital experiences with academic progression at the university level was observed. A semester-by-semester comparison between a pre-pandemic cohort and the current study also showed an increase in the use of digital media at university. However, attitudes towards digital media in teaching exhibited a slight decrease between pre-pandemic and current cohorts. These findings underscore the imperative of integrating digital tools in educational settings to bolster digital literacy and foster effective digital learning experiences, thereby equipping students with the necessary skills to navigate an increasingly digitalized world.