Many preservice teachers wish to do professional oriented degree project that can help them develop relevant and useful didactical knowledge for their future professional practice. At the same time, there is a requirement in the teacher education that the students do degree projects that must live up to academic standards in terms of high scientific quality. Student thesis that have a strong vocational orientation have shown to have difficulty living up to scientific standards, while students who do thesis with a strong academic orientation have had difficulty seeing the usefulness of the knowledge they develop for professional practice(Råde, 2014). The purpose of this presentation is to present ideas about how didactic modeling as a research approach in students thesis can be a way for students to develop useful knowledge for professional practice and to strive for high academic standard at the same time.

Wickman et al. (2018) argue for considering didactics as the academic discipline of teachers’ profession. The concept of didactic models plays a central role in their reasoning. Didactic models help teachers make decisions when planning, implementing and evaluating a specific content by supporting didactic analysis and design. This is referred to as didactic modeling. In didactic modelling, the exemplification phase is central. It concerns the documentation of teaching examples where a didactic model has been used for didactic analysis and design of teaching. In a student thesis, students can address a teaching problem they themselves have experienced and document how a didactic model can function as support for analysis and design in the process. This will be a way for the students to both increase their own didactical competence and contribute to the didactical knowledge based. Hence, the academic orientation simultaneously becomes a vocational orientation, and the tensions disappear. Authentic examples of student thesis from science education will be presented and discussed.