Pre-service teachers' conceptions on explicit, socioconstructivist and transmissive approaches to teaching and learning in French Speaking Belgium

Building upon Wanlin and Crahay this research aims at identifying the conceptions of pre-service teachers on transmissive, socioconstructivist and explicit approaches. While Wanlin and Crahay designed a questionnaire measuring the extent to which pre-service teachers embraced the transmissive and/or socioconstructivist approach, we hypothesise that explicit teaching is a distinct dimension of the model that needs to be apprehended by specific items and that may be embraced by some pre-service teachers. We designed a questionnaire including these new items on explicit teaching in addition to Wanlin and Crahay's items and administered it to 563 pre-service primary and secondary teachers in six training institutions in French-speaking Belgium. Our results do not support our starting hypothesis. Further focusing on transmissive and socioconstructivist conceptions in our respondents, our analyses show that the socioconstructivist conception is widely shared but do not systematically oppose a transmissive conception. We found evidence of effects related to institution, year of study and type of training on these conceptions.