Video Teaching Examples in Physical Education Teacher Education Experiment

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Tim Heemsoth
• Subject Area: General and Domain-Specific Teaching and Learning ; Educational Research on Socialization, Welfare and Professionalism
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 452103527

In university seminars that focus on teaching within a specific domain, pre-service teachers are often asked to plan their didactical approach based on teaching principles. It remains unclear, however, how teacher education can foster knowledge about instruction planning effectively. To reduce this gap in our knowledge, the current project investigates for the first time the effects of video-based teaching examples (VTEs) on pre-service teachers’ application-oriented and negative knowledge about instruction planning. The VTEs show how teaching that follows the idea of problem-based learning in physical education can be implemented with regard to different teaching purposes. Beyond investigating the effectiveness of such a learning environment, we aim to assess the efficacy of specific designs and instruction principles. Educational research found that – under certain circumstances – reflections on both problematic and good examples are more effective than reflections on only good examples. This finding is hitherto unverified for teacher education, however. Further, it is still unclear whether (i) a comparison rather than a sequential reflection of VTEs, (ii) complementary explanations of the teacher as part of the VTE, or (iii) self-formulated instructions of the pre-service teachers that precede the VTE reflections yield the best results in fostering the knowledge acquisition about instruction planning of pre-service teachers. We aim to answer these open questions by way of three experimental studies within physical education teacher education. In each study, 240 teacher students are randomly assigned to either a baseline or a control group or to one of four experimental groups. In the experimental groups, VTEs vary with respect to two independent variables for each experiment (quality of VTEs; working modus; complementary explanations; self-formulated instructions before or after). To get a fuller picture, we further assess specific confounding variables: teacher students’ prior knowledge and their beliefs, which previous studies have found to potentially moderate learning processes with teaching examples, and affective-motivational variables, which might mediate them. The study design allows us to identify causal effects of teaching examples as such as well as the impact of both the VTEs’ design and their instructional principles on knowledge of instruction planning. Our results will provide knowledge about learning processes with VTEs. This has direct implications for practices of teacher education.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants