Educational Practice to Enhance Teacher Trainees’ Practical Abilities for Learning Support through the Experience of Cognitive-Counseling

Abstract

In this study, we attempted to foster teacher trainee students’ practical abilities for learning support through cognitive counseling in a university class. Cognitive counseling is the activity to analyze and support learners’ problem in one-to-one tutoring situation. In the class of Educational Method, trainee students learned basic concepts on cognitive theory and basic procedure of cognitive counseling, then experienced cognitive counseling and wrote a paper on their counseling as homework. After completing the paper, they learned from a presentation of the representative student and reflected how they improved their counseling. To evaluate the effects of the practice, we require students to describe how they would respond to hypothetical tutoring situations twice before and after the class. In this task, a description was provided of pupils who had incorrectly solved concrete mathematical problems. We evaluated if students showed more descriptions on effective tutoring from four perspectives: assessment, explanation, comprehension checking, and strategy instruction. The results demonstrated that the descriptions on effective assessment, comprehension checking, and strategy instruction increased after the class.