How should the writing of learning protocols be supported in order to facilitate student teachers’ self-regulated construction of coherence and acquisition of applicable knowledge for teaching?

In teacher education, content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and general pedagogical knowledge are often taught in specialized seminars and lectures that rarely build on each other. Therefore, teacher students are prone to acquire fragmented knowledge for teaching that is not coherently integrated in long-term memory and consequently hardly applicable. Learning protocols are a promising approach to support student teachers’ self-regulated construction of coherence by using cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies. However, in order to be effective, the writing of learning protocols should be instructionally supported. Prompts as strategy activators and modelling examples have proven as beneficial support methods. Against this background, we conducted an experimental study with 74 student teachers. We investigated whether modelling and prompting better facilitated self-regulated coherence construction than writing a learning protocol without instructional support. Results showed that providing student teachers with an exemplary learning protocol that modelled coherence-creating strategies was superior to simply prompting such strategies. Both support methods were superior to unsupported writing with regard to the number and quality of the coherence-creating strategies enacted in the learning protocols. Use of coherence-creating strategies did not predict student teachers’ gains in knowledge for teaching. However, the frequency of coherence-creating strategies mediated student teachers’ ability to successfully apply the acquired knowledge for teaching in a transfer-test. Hence, instructionally supported learning protocols facilitated student teachers’ self-regulated construction of coherence and thereby helped them acquire applicable knowledge for teaching. © 2019, Die Herausgeber und Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature.