Using digital media to assess and promote school and adult education teacher competence

Abstract

Classrooms are informational environments that are highly complex in nature. Teachers need to make use of many different information sources in the classroom in order to adapt to these environments, perform successfully, and develop competence. Hence, effective design research in teacher education has to take this high complexity into account too, for instance by using video technologies. In the chapter presented here, we describe a research program that uses the advantages of digital media to assess and promote teacher competence. A web-based learning and testing environment was designed and implemented in several studies with school and adult education teachers. We successfully developed a test instrument to measure the pedagogical/psychological knowledge of teachers in the two chosen educational contexts via the web-based environment. Results of several intervention studies indicated that the web-based learning and testing environment with integrated video case studies is a powerful tool to promote taking on new perspectives and applying knowledge among school and adult education teachers. Implications for research, practice, and the required web-based infrastructure are discussed.