Fostering Integrated Mental Models of Multiple Texts on Different Professional Knowledge Domains: Instructional Approaches and Model-Based Analyses

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 33
  In Roundtable Session: Pedagogical Models and Strategies for Teaching With Technology

Abstract

This study investigates instructional writing tasks (unspecific vs. argumentative) and prompts to enhance pre-service teachers’ knowledge integration while learning with multiple documents. N = 100 pre-service teachers participated in an experiment where they read texts from different knowledge domains and wrote essays for global comprehension. The analyses include automated structural and semantic measures. The results indicate that prompts support pre-service teachers’ knowledge integration. The study shows explanatory power of automated measures for (a) integrative knowledge-transforming, (b) the merging of domain-specific information, and (c) separative knowledge-telling. The findings are discussed and conclusions are drawn for integrative learning environments in pre-service teacher education.

Authors

• Thomas Lehmann, University of Bremen

• Pablo Nicolai Pirnay-Dummer, Brandenburg Medical School