Prompted Journal Writing Supports Preservice History Teachers in Drawing on Multiple Knowledge Domains for Designing Learning Tasks

Trends in Research on Writing as a Learning Activity

“…However, they did not use statistical methods to test whether these variables actually exerted a mediating role. More recently, methods such as path analysis have been used for this purpose (e.g., Glogger, Schwonke, Holzäpfel, Nückles & Renkl, 2012;Klein & Kirkpatrick, 2010;Leopold, Sumfleth & Leutner, 2013;Petko, Egger & Graber, 2014;Wäschle, Gebhardt, Oberbusch & Nückles, 2015;Wäschle, Lehmann, Brauch & Nückles, 2015). These have supported the mediating role of elements such as cognitive strategies in WTL.…”

Fostering integrated mental models of different professional knowledge domains: instructional approaches and model-based analyses

“…Knowledge integration is characterized as a "dynamic process of linking, connecting, distinguishing, organizing, and structuring […] patterns, templates, views, ideas, theories, and visualizations" (Linn 2000, p. 783). But the self-directed integration of 'models' from different teacher knowledge domains is a very demanding task for pre-service teachers, especially without any instructional stimulation or support (Wäschle et al 2015), or various practical experiences (Hashweh 2005). As a result, student teachers' professional knowledge is hardly integrated when they complete their academic phase of initial teacher education (Ball 2000;Darling-Hammond 2006).…”

“…They possess only few links that bridge the gaps between knowledge structures and entities that are compartmentalized in separate memory parts (Renkl et al 1996). Hence, they have hard times taking multiple intelligent perspectives (Weinert et al 1990) in, for example, lesson planning (Seel 1997), modifying existing learning material from textbooks for their lesson (Hashweh 1987), or designing learning assignments (Wäschle et al 2015), which all are considered as key tasks for professional teaching (Baumert and Kunter 2013).…”

“…Since teaching experts do not only possess more professional knowledge (i.e., CK, PK, and PCK) than novices but especially differ by the extent of how much cross-references link initially unconnected knowledge structures into a common mental model (e.g., Berliner 2001;Bromme 2014;Livingston and Borko 1990), the development of purposeful learning opportunities is required to foster not only pre-service teachers' acquisition of professional knowledge but also their integration of knowledge. Few studies recently addressed the question of enhancing pre-service teachers' integration of knowledge that stems from different professional domains (Harr et al 2014(Harr et al , 2015Janssen and Lazonder 2016;Lee and Turner 2017;Lehmann et al 2019;Wäschle et al 2015). Some studies investigate writing tasks (Lehmann et al 2019) and prompted journal writing (Wäschle et al 2015) since writing itself has been often recognized as a tool for learning in general, and for integrative knowledge-transforming in particular (Scardamalia and Bereiter 1991;Tynjälä et al 2001;Wiley and Voss 1999).…”

“…Few studies recently addressed the question of enhancing pre-service teachers' integration of knowledge that stems from different professional domains (Harr et al 2014(Harr et al , 2015Janssen and Lazonder 2016;Lee and Turner 2017;Lehmann et al 2019;Wäschle et al 2015). Some studies investigate writing tasks (Lehmann et al 2019) and prompted journal writing (Wäschle et al 2015) since writing itself has been often recognized as a tool for learning in general, and for integrative knowledge-transforming in particular (Scardamalia and Bereiter 1991;Tynjälä et al 2001;Wiley and Voss 1999). Moreover, writing-to-learn involves externalization, which enables learners to not only understand but also communicate their understanding of the learning content by using adequate sign and symbol systems (Le Ny 1993), for example, via written formulations such as essays or learning journals.…”