COSIMA

Goals/Target group

Objective: To promote professional knowledge and diagnostic skills among biology teachers in simulation-based learning environments.

Target group: Teachers

In everyday teaching, it is important to diagnose certain situations in the classroom under considerable time pressure and to derive specific actions for the rest of the lesson. A number of epistemic-diagnostic activities, such as problem identification, evidence generation, evidence evaluation, and drawing conclusions, play an important role in this process.

This project focuses on the question of how conceptual-strategic professional knowledge acquired during university studies can be transferred into one's own teaching practice through simulation-based learning environments. Currently, there are models that describe the structure of professional knowledge (e.g., Baumert & Kunter, 2006; Blömeke et al., 2008; Jüttner et al., 2013, Shulman, 1987, Tepner et al., 2012, von Aufschnaiter & Blömeke, 2010), but the question of how this knowledge can be transferred into teaching practice remains largely unanswered. Furthermore, the role played by simulation-based learning environments and scaffolding conditions in this context also remains largely unclear. Initial findings from biology suggest that conceptual-strategic subject-specific didactic knowledge is important for reflecting on video-based teaching simulations (Schmelzing et al., 2010).

In addition, the order in which knowledge is imparted also appears to play an important role in building a professional knowledge base (Kleickmann, 2014). The effectiveness of video-based simulation environments for the application of subject-specific didactic knowledge has already been demonstrated in a study on foreign language teaching, but only when scaffolding measures were integrated into the learning environment (Goeze et al., 2014).