Lesson planning is a central component of the teaching profession. In terms of competence-oriented teacher education, the written lesson plan represents a potential learning opportunity for prospective teachers. Against the background of heterogeneous learning settings, adaptive planning competence is of particular importance in order to anticipate individual learning processes in a subject-unspecific manner. This paper presents the developed measurement instrument General Didactic Criteria for Assessing Adaptive Planning Competence in Dealing with Heterogeneity (AlPako), which is based on a strategy-category model. The instrument subsumes criteria to extract and quantify planning decisions as part of written lesson plans. The instrument was used to analyze lesson plans (n = 82) from 23 subjects or subject groups of prospective teachers. The collected data were analyzed using confirmatory factor analyses and show a good model fit (ƒÔ2 (n = 82, df = 34) = 36.07 p = .37, ƒÔ2/df = 1.06, CFI = 0.95, RMSEA = .02, WRMR = 0.75). Furthermore, the influence of text surface features (complexity, text length) in the written instructional drafts on criteria-based measures of adaptive planning skills was ruled out.

Keywords
Adaptivity, heterogeneity, planning competence, teacher training, text interface features