Facilitating the Analytical Competency of Pre-Service Teachers with Digital Video Cases: Effects of Hyperlinks to Conceptual Knowledge and Multiple Perspectives

Analytical competency in classroom situations can be seen as a crucial aspect of teachers’ professional competency. While case-based learning is considered to have great potential for the promotion of analytical skills of teachers, there have been few attempts to investigate the effects of corresponding instructional support. The empirical study presented here investigates the effects of instructional support in the form of hyperlinks to conceptual knowledge or multiple perspectives in a computer-supported case-based learning environment based on the principles of cognitive flexibility theory. 97 prospective foreign-language teachers participated in a field study with a 2x2-factorial design. The pre-post comparison of the individual participants reveals that specific components of analytical competency could be fostered by the different treatments. Process analyses show that particularly the multiple perspectives affected the small group discussions of the cases. These results underline the importance of adequate instructional support for effective case-based learning in teacher education.