Abstract
In teacher education at universities, general pedagogical and psychological principles are often treated separately from subject matter knowledge and therefore run the risk of not being applied in the teaching subject. In an experimental study (N = 60 mathematics student teachers) we investigated the effects of providing aspects of general pedagogical/psychological knowledge (PPK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in an integrated or separated way. In both conditions (“integrated” vs. “separated”), participants individually worked on computer-based learning environments addressing the same topic: use and handling of multiple external representations, a central issue in mathematics. We experimentally varied whether PPK aspects and PCK aspects were treated integrated or apart from one another. As expected, the integrated condition led to greater application of pedagogical/psychological aspects and an increase in applying both knowledge types simultaneously compared to the separated condition. Overall, our findings indicate beneficial effects of an integrated design in teacher education.
Highlights
For quite some time, there has been criticism concerning the imbalance in teacher education between university education and later job demands (Finn, 2001; Grossman, 2008)
In an experimental study (N = 60 mathematics student teachers) we investigated the effects of providing aspects of general pedagogical/psychological knowledge (PPK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in an integrated or separated way
Participants were mathematics student teachers with only little prior knowledge on PPK and PCK related to learning from multiple representations
Summary
There has been criticism concerning the imbalance in teacher education between university education and later job demands (Finn, 2001; Grossman, 2008). Student teachers typically acquire knowledge of domain general pedagogical and psychological aspects, providing them with important knowledge for powerful teaching (Voss et al, 2011) These methods courses are rarely connected to content of teaching or subject didactics (e.g., mathematics education), leaving the challenge of integration to the individual teacher. Pedagogical/psychological knowledge (i.e., PPK; Voss et al, 2011), content knowledge, and PCK (Shulman, 1986, 1987) are at risk of being encoded in different cognitive compartments without substantial cross-referencing (Renkl et al, 1996) This educationmade chasm can lead to inert knowledge (Whitehead, 1929) − the non-use of general PPK when teaching certain content areas. The domain-general pedagogical/psychological subdimensions “teaching methods” and “knowledge about learning processes and individual characteristics” become especially important as soon as teachers incorporate multiple representations, a common practice in mathematics lessons
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