Promoting student teacher learning through conceptual change or direct instruction

This paper focuses on a promising approach to student teacher learning which treats the pre-existing beliefs of student teachers as a starting point for their active inquiry into relevant educational knowledge bases for teaching. A group of teacher educators and researchers, jointly developed a conceptual change program in which student teachers were stimulated to explicate their beliefs, search for new knowledge, and enact what had been learned in their practice teaching. The Conceptual Change approach to the instruction of student teachers was compared with a Direct Instruction approach. The Conceptual Change program did outperform the Direct Instruction program; however, no substantial belief change was detected. Contrary to what was expected, the Conceptual Change program did not result in higher levels of reflectivity. It was concluded from this study that a Conceptual Change program can improve performance, but that this will be only a superficial change as long as no concurrent belief change is reached. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.