Improvement of Teacher Education Videos

What is the research topic?

In teacher education, videos are a widely-used tool to help preservice teachers develop fundamental competencies for future practice, such as general pedagogical/psychological knowledge (PPK), and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). By applying their theoretical understanding of these principles toward videotaped classroom situations, teacher students can enhance their abilities to notice, reason, and make predictions about relevant teaching events, cultivating their professional vision.
However, from the perspective of multimedia instructional design, videos for instruction are often utilized in suboptimal ways which can interfere with learning (e.g. split-attention effect; transient information effect). Thus, to better inform instructional design for video use in teacher education, this research project aims to examine potential mechanisms that could buffer these disadvantages. Specifically, Teacher Education Video Improvement (TEVI) focuses on PPK and PCK with respect to principles of effective tutoring in biology and investigates the extent to which their acquisition can be fostered when video instruction is informed by various principles of multimedia instructional design.

What is the specific issue in this project?

Funded by the German Research Foundation (DGF), TEVI is a collaborative research project between the Technical University of Munich, the University of Freiburg and the University of Education Freiburg, integrating research within Educational Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, and Educational Didactics.
This partnership enables TEVI to perform parallel experiments focusing on the acquisition of teacher student’s PPK (Munich) and PCK (Freiburg) using example-based learning from video. In a preliminary study, we explore teacher students’ major deficits in PPK/PCK of effective tutoring principles, to address them in subsequent experiments. We then conduct several studies, investigating the effects of multimedia instructional design techniques like video segmentation, marking important information (signaling) and changing the observational focus for successive viewings (emphasis-shift training). A final experiment tests the extent to which emphasis-shift training can be used to develop both PPK and PCK within the same videos.

In examining the effectiveness of these multimedia strategies, the expected findings can provide valuable evidence about the real-world utility of multimedia instructional design principles for learning with video. These outcomes not only contribute to improving the wide-spread use of video in preparation for professional teaching practice, but could also extend into video-based in-service teacher professional development, or for application within teachers’ own classrooms. Project conclusions may also generalize to broader educational contexts, for example in medical education.