Helping preservice teachers with inaccurate and fragmentary prior knowledge to acquire conceptual understanding of psychological principles

Abstract

Psychological research on learning has brought forth many insights that are relevant for teachers (for example, knowledge about learning strategies). However, teachers sometimes have intuitive fragmentary knowledge that is partly incorrect. Such knowledge hinders the acquisition of psychological knowledge. Tried-and-tested interventions dealing with fragmentary knowledge remain scarce and thus a generalized categorical framework was developed to support preservice teachers to (re)organize their fragmentary prior knowledge. In the present experiment the framework group (n=23) received this categorical framework as a pretraining intervention. The control group (n=22) received similar factual information as a pretraining intervention but no categorical framework. Afterwards, all participants learned about cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies. While achieving approximately equal learning outcomes, the framework group needed less learning time (strong effect) and stated higher interest (medium effect). Overall, this study reveals that providing a categorical framework can help to heighten preservice teachers' interest in the learning material and save learning time.