Instructional Science

This study investigates how vocational education and training prepares students for future professions characterized by technological advancements and demands for sustainability and innovation. Specifically, it examines simulator-based learning in the Natural Resource Program at three upper secondary schools in Sweden. Using a sociomaterial perspective, the study aims to investigate the strategies used by the participants (both students and teachers) in a simulated activity to make sense of the task at hand when dealing with different kinds of situations and activities therein, and in what ways these may be conducive to the development of vocational knowledge. An ethnographic approach is used, employing various methodological tools to create rich datasets, including observations, video recordings, and fieldnotes. The focus is on teachers’ feedback, students’ questions, and task handling during simulation-based training. The analysis explores the relationships between these environments and how feedback and assessment practices affect students’ task performance. When dealing with simulation-based learning in the context of this study, the instructional processes seem to involve, rather than handling specific high-stakes and risky situations, the design of activities that aim at volume training. These activities are entangled with the training sessions included in the simulators but also with other practices and environments. We argue that the instructional work of the vocational teacher deals with making sense of how such entanglements work and are conducive to learning on the one hand, but also to making choices that imply unravelling such entanglements and keeping the worlds apart to put them back together again.

In the literature, there is a general assumption that teachers teach more effectively during team teaching compared with solo teaching. Although effective teaching behaviour is imperative for students’ academic outcomes, only scarce research exists on this difference. Therefore, it remains mainly unknown whether teachers teach more effectively during team teaching compared with solo teaching. This study aims to address this gap by providing a general picture of the differences in teachers’ self-reported effective teaching behaviour during solo teaching and team teaching. To achieve this, a large-scale cross-sectional survey study was performed among teachers (n = 453) in compulsory education. The SET questionnaire was administered to teachers who team teach. Overall, results show that teachers reported to be more capable of displaying effective teaching behaviour during team teaching compared with solo teaching. Furthermore, results show a positive relationship between teachers’ self-reported effective teaching behaviour and education type, teaching experience, and with team teaching percentage.

Enhancing students’ conceptual understanding and improving their inquiry skills and motivation for learning science are the goals of science instruction in learning environments. The current study investigated how different inquiry-based learning environments (regular classroom and computer-based environments) affect middle school students’ conceptual understanding of force and energy, inquiry skills, and motivation for learning science. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest research design was used, with a total of 306 seventh-grade participants. A conceptual understanding test, an inquiry skills test, a motivation scale, and interviews were used to gather data. The findings revealed that the students in the computer-based learning environments showed significantly greater improvement than their counterparts in regular classroom environments in terms of conceptual understanding and inquiry skills. However, there was no meaningful difference in their motivation for learning science. Furthermore, the number of misconceptions about the topic of force and energy held by the students who learned in computer-based learning environments was relatively high. Possible reasons for the results including the advantages of instructional technologies, students’ inquiry abilities, and factors affecting motivation are discussed.

As the demands of society are changing, a continuous adaptation of modules is needed on what to teach, how it should be taught, and ways to assess it. Therefore, the aim was to investigate how to constructively align learning outcomes, teaching-and-learning activities, and assessment tasks of a mathematics methodology module. The sample consisted of three mathematics teacher educators and 42 mathematics pre-service teachers purposively selected from a South African university. This qualitative study adopted the three phases of design-based research (DBR) (preliminary, teacher experiment, and retrospective) to collect data from learning guides, literature, surveys, and online reflections. Qualitative data were inductively coded, whereafter responses were quantified at a descriptive level. The findings revealed six learning outcomes sequenced from lower to higher levels of understanding, comprising affective, psychological, epistemological, pedagogical, curricular, and sociological dimensions. Eight teaching-and-learning activities allowed mathematics pre-service teacher involvement in achieving the learning outcomes. These activities were evaluated through various assessment tasks that mirrored the learning outcomes. This alignment provides information about knowledge, skills, and values to consider in preparing mathematics pre-service teachers for the teaching profession. This study contributes to existing studies on constructive alignment (CA) by showing how the phases of DBR can assist in redesigning a mathematics methodology module, simultaneously enhancing theory and practice, and so paving the way for course amendments to improve learning in diverse contexts. This study opens doors for further investigation in establishing design principles for implementing CA in university-level modules.

Problem-solving before instruction has been shown to be a more effective learning design than traditional tell-and-practice for several mathematical concepts at the secondary school level. In particular, the more a problem-solving before instruction design follows the productive failure principles, such as comparing and contrasting student-generated solutions, the higher the effect on students’ conceptual understanding and transfer. University mathematics education poses several inherent constraints that complicate the implementation of these principles. In the present study, we implemented a problem-solving before instruction design in a university linear algebra course adhering to the productive failure principles as closely as possible. Participation in the preparatory problems was voluntary. We investigated the effect on students’ learning over four one-year iterations in a design-based research approach. Compared to the baseline (aggregate of cohorts prior to the intervention), we observed a significant increase in final exam performance for all four cohorts with effect sizes between Cohen’s d = 0.28 and d = 0.59. For students who agreed to further analyses, our results show that up to 16% of the variance in students’ performance can be explained by variance in their participation in the problem-solving before instruction design. As our design did not include a control group, we refrain from conclusions regarding any design components that might have caused these effects. However, these results are promising, given that our implementation involved only minor changes to the original course structure and required little extra time for students.

Illustrative examples demonstrate how abstract information can be applied in real-world. In the context of advancing evidence-informed teaching practice, the current intervention study investigated to what extent student teachers should be supported in learning educational theories and findings by different example-based approaches. Conducting a 1 × 3-factorial design, N = 105 student teachers were randomly assigned to three experimental groups: After a pre-test, all groups received the same learning instruction on the topic of cooperative learning. Then, (1) n = 35 students were prompted to generate own examples for the instructional text, (2) n = 35 students received examples along with the text, and (3) n = 35 students studied the text only, without any prompts or examples. In a post-questionnaire, it was retrospectively assessed how students perceived their learning control in engaging with the material; in a post-test, knowledge retention and knowledge transfer were measured. As assumed, findings revealed that generating examples enhanced perceived learning control and learning outcomes compared to studying provided examples. Students who learned with the instructional text only achieved lowest learning outcomes; but contrary to the expectations, these students perceived their learning control comparably high as those who generated examples. Mediation analyses indicated that for students who received illustrative examples or the instructional text only, a greater learning control perception was positively associated with knowledge retention, subsequently enhancing knowledge transfer. The study underscores the benefits of illustrative examples in teacher education, particularly when students engage in generating them. It suggests further examination of how and why example generation facilitates learning.