Learning from animated classroom exemplars: the case for guiding student teachers' observations with metacognitive prompts

Student teachers learned about teaching principles with the help of an instructional program that included classroom animation exemplars, where expert teachers demonstrate how to apply teaching principles to a classroom scenario. Some students learned by solely observing the classroom animations, whereas others were presented with the expert's metacognitive prompts during their observations, either with or without the presence of the expert on the computer screen. Metacognitive prompts consisted of activating the teaching principles learned and focusing students' attention on relevant classroom information. Student teachers who were not provided with metacognitive prompts took longer time to study the instructional materials, produced lower scores in a transfer test, and showed lower motivation to learn than their counterparts. Consistent with past research on animated pedagogical agents, the expert teacher's presence on the computer screen did not affect learning. The findings support the need to use metacognitive prompts to help novice students effectively learn from virtual classroom scenarios.