PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Future teachers face the challenge of whether and how to address their students' misconceptions—naïve concepts that often conflict with the correct scientific concepts taught at school. We developed a short-term digital training intervention on instructional knowledge about strategies for addressing students' misconceptions in physics. It comprised cognitive modelling of three instructional strategies (i.e. ignoring, refuting, and integrating) and self-explanation prompts. In a web experiment with 58 teacher students, we found that our digital intervention fostered learning processes (self-explanation quality) and learning outcomes (knowledge about three instructional strategies). It can thus help teacher students to acquire initial knowledge about how to tackle their future students' misconceptions. Self-explanation quality mediated the intervention's effect on instructional knowledge both immediately and 3 weeks later. These mediation effects emphasise the impact of self-explanations while learning from complex cognitive models. Finally, the intervention's positive side effect of reducing participants' own misconceptions is an additional practical advantage.