Analysis and facilitation of pre-service teachers' use of multiple scientific and non-scientific documents during evidence-oriented reasoning - effects of fit, consistency, and specific scaffolding approaches

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Ingo Kollar; Professor Dr. Robin Stark
• Subject Area: General and Domain-Specific Teaching and Learning
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 395758789

Teachers are increasingly demanded to solve problematic classroom situations by aid of scientific, educational evidence. This specifically applies to reoccurring problems that might have severe consequences for students’ knowledge and competence acquisition if they are left unaddressed. When it comes to solving such problems, teachers are often confronted with a broad range of information from multiple documents that has to be integrated successfully. This includes information from scientific as well as from non-scientific sources. Further, the information may differ in its „fit“ to the problem at hand (i.e., the presented evidence is either easily or not so easily applicable to the given classroom problem). Beyond that, these documents can either be consistent or inconsistent to each other, i.e., they may advocate either the same or competing ways to solve the given problem. How to deal with information from multiple documents that exhibits a low fit to the given problem and that is inconsistent with each other is a skill that should already be developed during pre-service teacher education. However, little is known about how high vs. low fit and consistency vs. inconsistency of information from documents of scientific and non-scientific sources affect (a) how pre-service teachers use and integrate this information, and (b) how they can be scaffolded to handle documents with low fit and pronounced inconsistency. Therefore, the planned project includes three empirical studies in which pre-service teachers are asked to analyze authentic case vignettes that describe problematic classroom situations by aid of multiple scientific and non-scientific documents. Study 1 investigates the effects of documents with a high vs. low fit to the problem that is described in the case vignette, while Study 2 looks at the effects of consistent vs. inconsistent documents. The core dependent variables are (a) the extent to which participants use information from the documents and (b) the quality of this integration. Based on the results of these studies, Study 3 tests the effects of different scaffolding approaches that are designed to support pre-service teachers in successfully dealing with documents that have a low fit and that are inconsistent to each other. More specifically, we look at the effects of (a) metacognitive integration prompts and (b) contrastive worked examples. The results of these studies can provide valuable insights in how students process information of multiple documents from different sources and valuable information on how to design learning opportunities to foster pre-service teachers’ acquisition of evidence-informed reasoning skills.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Dr. Martin Greisel; Dr. Claudia Wekerle