Simulations in Teacher Education: Learning to Diagnose Cognitive Engagement

Technology has shown to be beneficial for initiating cognitive engagement. In the present study, cognitive engagement was conceptualized by the ICAP framework, proposing four levels of cognitive engagement (interactive, constructive, active, passive), which can be determined from observable student activities. To initiate cognitive engagement, teachers require diagnostic skills. With this study, we aimed to foster those skills. We designed and validated a simulation with N = 213 pre-service teachers to investigate the validity of the simulation. Moreover, we evaluated the difficulty of diagnosing the levels of cognitive engagement within planning and implementing lessons. We used linear regressions for the validation and confusion matrices for insights into the diagnostic process. The study results show a varying difficulty of diagnosing levels of cognitive engagement due to (a) challenges in inferring the involved cognitive processes and (b) different phases of teaching. Levels of cognitive engagement that require inferential processes to identify them are more difficult to diagnose. This highlights the importance of adding scaffolds to our simulation to help pre-service teachers understand the processes of generating knowledge and co-generating knowledge. More importantly, the study reveals shortcomings of the ICAP framework and presents first suggestions for its further development.