Effectiveness of online and blended delivery methods on preservice teachers’ knowledge and beliefs for writing instruction

ABSTRACT

The wide expansion of digital technologies in higher education and the importance of specialised training in teaching writing as a guarantee of school success, have introduced the need to focus on the online professional development for the teaching of writing. This study aims to evaluate the effects of a web-based training for writing instruction on pre-service teachers’ knowledge and beliefs under two different delivery methods (i.e. online vs. blended). To meet this goal, 90 pre-service teachers formed the blended group, and 73 pre-service teachers formed the online group. Split-Plot Anovas results indicate that the web-based training seems to be a suitable tool for improving the knowledge regardless of the delivery method and making changes in beliefs due to the training modality. Implications for the initial training of pre-service teachers’ in writing instruction are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Web-based training
• pre-service teachers’ development
• knowledge
• beliefs
• writing

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Ministerio de Econom?a y Competitividad (Spain) [PSI2015-65009-R].

The authors would like to thank the members of the Learning Disabilities, Psycholinguistic and Information and Communication Technologies (DEAP&NT) research team from Universidad de La Laguna, for their help with tool design.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Plan Nacional I+D+I (R+D+i National Research Plan of the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness), project ref.: PSI2015-65009-R, with the second author as PI.