Prompts enhance transfer
Posted: 22. December 2011 Filed under: Entwicklung, Forschung Leave a comment »IFeL is evaluating instructional scaffolding with prompts in collaboration with the PH Wallis (Valais teacher education college). The prompts are thought to enhance transfer of communication competences in teaching from a course to a teaching situation. Future teachers are prompted in a blended learning environment with a series of hints and questions to increase their communication skills in class.
In a first phase the students worked with the prompts, in a second phase they had to fill in multiple-choice-questions as a control condition. Next year we will rerun this design changing the sequence with multiple-choice-questions first followed by prompting. The prompting activity was measured with the «communication interaction level» for logs proposed by Hamuy & Galaz (2010). For 21 students the communication competences were coded by trained raters based on video recordings of internships with regular classes.
The results of the first year (2011) show that prompting enhanced the transfer from the communication course to the communication competences in class.
We found a significant correlation between prompting and communication competences of .47, and of .60 when controlled for pre-knowledge and transfer motivation with 36% of the variance explained. The multiple choice condition has a non-significant correlation with the communication competences of .23, and .31 when controlled for pre-knowledge and transfer motivation with 10% of the variance explained.
The name of the project is LCLL, i.e. Förderung des Lerntransfers durch computerbasiertes Prompting in einem Blended-Learning-Szenario für Lehramtskandidaten/innen. Its duration is from February 2011 until June 2012.
