Level one: Teaching practice – Does playing a digital teaching simulation game foster novice student teachers’ perception and use of theoretical knowledge?

Despite theoretical knowledge being an important source for well-founded teaching decisions, student teachers often struggle to put this knowledge into practice. One way to close this theory-practice gap could be digital teaching simulation games that enable theory-use in authentic critical teaching situation. To assess their potential for teacher education, we conducted a learning experiment with 126 novice student teachers. In this experiment, after reading an expository text on classroom management, student teachers either played a digital teaching simulation-game (simulation condition) or read a screenshot-sequence depicting the game's content (screenshot condition). We assessed the student teachers' ability to apply theoretical knowledge featured in the text, how useful they perceive theoretical knowledge, their self-efficacy and their motivation to reuse the learning material. Against our expectations, participants in the screenshot condition outperformed participants in the simulation condition in transfer tasks. Participants in the simulation condition, however, reported higher teaching self-efficacy for both classroom management and instructional strategies. Both learning materials similarly increased participants perception of theoretical knowledge as useful for teaching. Participants' learning times showed that participants in the simulation condition spent significantly less time reading the feedback presented at the end of the material than participants in the screenshot condition. Taken together, our results suggest that while student teachers want to learn with simulation games, they might not do so effectively if they are not instructed thoroughly. Further research is needed to explore this assumption. • We tested if a simulation game influences theory-application in student teachers. • Simulated teaching did not foster knowledge transfer more than game screenshots. • Playing the digital simulation game increased teaching self-efficacy. • Learning times suggest that participants did not use effective learning strategies.