Fostering pre-service teachers' assessment skills in a video simulation

Abstract: An adequate on-the-fly assessment of relevant learner characteristics is an essential professional ability for effective teaching. However, this task is challenging, particularly for teacher students, as they often struggle in applying conceptual knowledge and lack perception of personal value and utility of study contents. Video-based simulations enable the acquisition of practice-oriented abilities for student assessment in initial teacher education. Implementing additional scaffolding in simulations can increase learning gains. The present study examines whether a utility value intervention and conceptual knowledge prompts can effectively support the assessment of relevant learner characteristics and how such effects are influenced by success expectancy. The study participants were N = 108 pre-service teachers, who completed a validated video-based simulation. They were randomly assigned to both interventions (utility value intervention, conceptual prompts) in a 2 × 2 design. The results showed that conceptual prompts improved judgment accuracy effectively. The utility value intervention yielded only descriptive improvements that require further investigations. The combination of both interventions was least effective. Furthermore, the results suggest that participants with low success expectancy benefited more from conceptual prompts. These results suggest that conceptual knowledge prompts and tentatively also utility value interventions can be used as effective scaffolds in simulations in the context of assessment skills. However, they also tentatively suggest that more processing and reflection time might be required for the combined scaffold to be effective. In addition, the differential effectiveness of both scaffolds emphasizes that an adaptation of scaffolds based on, for example, success expectancy can support additional learning gains.