Beyond expectations: a three-dimensional perspective on pre-service and in-service teachers' engagement with teacher-oriented evidence media

Introduction Teacher education provides knowledge that supports (pre-service) teachers in continually improving their professional practice by introducing research evidence to prepare evidence-informed teaching. After completing their studies, teachers primarily access research evidence through professional development and engagement with various media sources. Technological advancements and open-access initiatives have widened the range of media communicating educational evidence—from academic journals to digital platforms and social media. While prerequisites for evidence-informed teaching, such as usefulness expectations, have been widely studied, the role of the communicating media has received little empirical attention. Methods This study examines how pre-service and in-service teachers engage with eight different types of teacher-oriented evidence media (TOE media) across three dimensions of engagement: familiarity , expectation of useful evidence , and use. By linking these dimensions to established barriers to evidence-informed teaching, the study provides insights into (pre-service) teachers’ perspectives on sources of evidence relevant to their professional practice. In a longitudinal research design, a digital survey was administered during the 2024/2025 school year among in-service teachers ( n t1 = 137; n t3 = 111) and pre-service teachers ( n t1 = 126; n t2 = 133; n t3 = 63) in one German federal state. Given limited longitudinal participation, stability analyses draw on the longitudinal subsamples (in-service: n = 37; pre-service: n = 65), while group comparisons are based on repeated cross-sectional samples. Results and Discussion The findings extend current perspectives on evidence-informed teaching in three ways. First, they emphasize that most pre-service and in-service teachers expect useful evidence in academic TOE media and platforms for sharing experiential knowledge, provided that they are familiar with these sources. Second, engagement with academic TOE media across all three dimensions—familiarity, expectation of useful evidence, and use—is consistently associated with higher practical knowledge and self-efficacy beliefs and less skepticism toward evidence-informed teaching. Third, systematic differences between pre-service and in-service teachers indicate that professional experience and the perceived demands of daily practice shape how evidence is sought, interpreted, and valued.