Evaluation of a Pedagogical Concept for Higher Education to Foster Pre-service Teachers’ Media Education Competence

Continuous advancements in the media landscape are leading to new requirements for promoting media competence of children and adolescents. Accordingly, pre-service teachers should be prepared to promote media education and critical media reflection in schools. This third iteration of a design-based research study evaluates whether the learning objectives of a refined theory- and practice-based pedagogical concept, designed to foster pre-service teachers’ media education competence, have been achieved. A convenience sample of 35 pre-service teachers completed competence-based tasks before and after the intervention and prepared media education lesson designs throughout the semester. Results of a qualitative content analysis and inferential statistics showed significant improvements in outlining the significance of students’ extracurricular media use, illustrating consequences for media education activities, outlining theoretical approaches to media education, evaluating these approaches and existing media education lesson designs, and developing own media education lesson designs. In their lesson designs, participants engaged with students’ diverse media experiences and addressed socially responsible media education in varied ways. Implications for research and higher education practice are provided.