Web-based case conferencing for preservice teacher education: Electronic discourse from the field

The purpose of this study was to foster preservice-teacher learning of educ ational psychology by creating a Web-based learning community using actual case situations these future teachers had experienced during their field ob servations. In this study, 146 undergraduate educational psychology student s were randomly assigned to two different electronic conferencing groups wh ere they generated teaching vignettes related to their early field experien ces and reacted to the cases of their peers. As a counterbalanced research design, half of these students received heavy scaffolding (HS) during the f irst three weeks of electronic case conferencing and weak scaffolding (WS) during the following three weeks; the other half received the opposite. Wit hin these conferences, there were a total of 229 cases generated for discus sion with 1,320 replies. While there were 20 percent more postings in the f irst three weeks, the cases and responses generated in the second three wee ks were lengthier Importantly, HS fostered 18 percent more student cases th an WS, though these were of significantly lower quality than the WS cases. A coding of dialogue transcripts from fifty-eight randomly selected cases i ndicated that peer feedback was extremely conversational and opinionated, w hereas instructor mentoring was focused on high level questioning course re lated advice, and case specific feedback.