Beyond subject specificity – student and teacher thinking as sources of specificity in teacher diagnostic judgments

Teachers’ diagnostic judgments are considered highly relevant for good teaching and successful learning. A question regularly asked is: Which aspects of diagnostic judgments are generic and which aspects are specific for a subject or even a topic within that subject? Several sources of specificity have to be considered in diagnostic judgment processes. In order to analyze systematically the aspect of specificity in research on diagnostic judgments, we propose a framework of diagnostic judgments, which explicates relevant components of thinking and behavior on the level of the student and the teacher. We use this framework to discuss systematically the question of content specificity.