Student errors: How teachers diagnose and respond to them

Abstract

Current pedagogical discourse has established that teacher competence is a conditio sine qua non for high level performance in the classroom. Nevertheless questions of conceptualising and measuring teacher competence have yet to be answered. In our study we analyse a facet of teacher competence essential to successful learning processes; namely, teacher competence when diagnosing and responding to student errors in a constructive manner. Two pilot studies investigate how students perceive error culture in their classrooms, and how teachers deal with learner errors during lessons.