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Diagnostic competences of teachers are an essential prerequisite for the individual support of students and, therefore, highly important. There is a substantial amount of research on teachers’ diagnostic competences, mostly operationalized as diagnostic accuracy, and on how diagnostic competences may be influenced by teachers’ professional knowledge base. While this line of research already includes studies on the influence of teachers’ content knowledge (CK), pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and pedagogical-psychological knowledge (PK) on the diagnosis of subject-specific knowledge or skills, research on the diagnosis of cross-domain skills (i.e., skills relevant for more than one subject), such as scientific reasoning, is lacking although students’ scientific reasoning skills are regarded as important for multiple school subjects (e.g., biology or physics). This study investigates how the accuracy of pre-service teachers’ diagnosis of scientific reasoning is influenced by teachers’ own scientific reasoning skills (one kind of CK), their topic-specific knowledge (i.e., knowledge about a topic that constitutes the thematic background for teaching scientific reasoning; which is another kind of CK), and their knowledge about the diagnosis of scientific reasoning (one kind of PCK) and whether the relationships between professional knowledge and diagnostic accuracy are similar across subjects. The design of the study was correlational. The participants completed several tests for the kinds of professional knowledge mentioned and questionnaires for several control variables. To ensure sufficient variation in pre-service teachers’ PCK, half of the participants additionally read a text about the diagnosis of scientific reasoning. Afterwards, the participants completed one of two parallel video-based simulations (depicting a biology or physics lesson) measuring diagnostic accuracy. The pre-service teachers’ own scientific reasoning skills (CK) were a statistically significant predictor of diagnostic accuracy, whereas topic-specific knowledge (CK) or knowledge about the diagnosis of scientific reasoning (PCK), as manipulated by the text, were not. Additionally, no statistically significant interactions between subject (biology or physics) and the different kinds of professional knowledge were found. These findings emphasize that not all facets of professional knowledge seem to be equally important for the diagnosis of scientific reasoning skills, but more research is needed to clarify the generality of these findings.

In recent years, the call for an evidence-based practice has become more prevalent for educational professionals. However, educational professionals are rarely prepared for evidence-based practice; for example, teachers are not prepared to use and, thus, rarely do use scientific evidence in planning lessons. The knowledge and skills in appraising scientific literature, the basis of evidence-based practice, needs to be trained as early in professional education as possible. An effective training might start in university education of future educational professionals, engaging them in learning activities that foster their understanding of criteria that are used in appraising scientific literature and the skill to do so. However, we know little about the effect of different learning activities such as constructive or interactive learning in this context. Thus, this study investigated the influence of constructive versus interactive learning activities in the context of an intervention facilitating knowledge and skills in appraising scientific literature. This experimental study used a pre-posttest between-subject design with 105 participants. The students learned to evaluate scientific literature in an online learning environment. The results show that the inclusion of interactive versus constructive learning activities did not explain students’ learning in the intervention. The results implicate that the learning activities might not play a major role with learning contents such as evidence-based practice. However, the gain in skills and knowledge from pre- to posttest shows promising achievements in preparing future educational professionals in their evidence-based practice.

Abstract Students must engage in self-regulated learning in computer-based learning environments; however, many students experience difficulties in doing so. Therefore, this study aims to investigate self-created metacognitive prompts as a means of supporting students in their learning process and improving their learning performance. We conducted an experimental study with a between-subject design. The participants learned with self-created metacognitive prompts (n = 28) or without prompts (n = 29) in a hypermedia learning environment for 40 min while thinking aloud. In a second learning session (stability test), all participants learned about a different topic without prompts. The results showed no clear effect of the self-created metacognitive prompts on the learning process and performance. A deeper analysis revealed that students’ prompt utilization had a significant effect on performance in the second learning session. This study contributes to the research investigating how students can be supported in ways that enhance their learning process and performance.