Exploring Pre-Service Teachers’ Mental Models and Beliefs Through Drawings: A Revised Tool to Assess Teaching Models in Outdoor Science Learning Contexts

Understanding pre-service teachers’ beliefs and mental models about teaching is crucial in teacher education, as it helps to address future instruction. The Draw-a-Science-Teacher-Test Checklist (DASTT-C) is a useful tool to assess their science teaching models but struggles to distinguish between teacher-centered and student-centered approaches when situations outside the classroom are depicted. To address this, a revised tool, R-DASTTC, was created incorporating complementary elements related to outdoor learning contexts. The revised tool was validated by experts and in a pilot test conducted with 244 pre-service teachers during the 2023/24 and 2024/25 academic years. Of all the drawings collected, 56 depicted science outdoor situations. A comparative analysis of both instruments was carried out showing that R-DASTTC can be used to assess teaching models and has higher internal consistency. As such, it better reflects students’ intended representations of teaching models, allowing for clearer distinctions between teacher-centered and student-centered approaches when the situation represented takes place outside the classroom.