Ratings of usability of didactic models: a comparative case study in Croatia and Germany

ABSTRACT

The study refers to the unfavourable reputation and status of general didactics as well as its decreasing importance in teacher education. This is a result of poor performance achieved in international tests by students. They score low on knowledge and arguments, and empirical studies indicate that didactic models are useless. In view of the above problem, the aim of this article is to examine the validity of the argument that didactic models are useless. It is necessary to examine if general didactics are being in an unfavourable position along with its possible successors in the international context. In order to achieve that, we conducted an empirical study into the usability of didactic models for lesson planning in Croatia and compared it with the results obtained in previous research in Germany. The term usability means the advantages of theory in practice. On the basis of the results of the empirical study, we concluded that didactic models are not generally unusable. Additionally, they are different according to their usability. These results open a path for further research on this topic in the international context.

KEYWORDS:

• General didactics
• didactic models
• usability
• global reform process of standardization of education
• education standards

Notes

1. Künzli (2000) points out that the adjective German is used to indicate the linguistic and cultural area, and has no intention of referring to the geographical entity, especially not to any particular nation or country; therefore, the concept of the German didactics relates to past and present contributions in the context of more or less explicit educational tradition in the German-speaking countries.

2. The current global reform process regarding the standardization of education is promoted by the international education policy (influenced by the activities of organizations, such as the OECD, the World Bank, the European Union) and supported by the international tests of learner knowledge (e.g. TIMMS and PISA). Thus, it is becoming a common feature of the management of educational systems in developed countries (Palekčić, 2006, 2007a, 2007b; Šoljan, 2007). Educational standards represent an instrument for managing school systems oriented to output (learning outcomes) as opposed to the traditional concept of input (oriented to programmes or contents) (Bašić, 2007a, 2007b; Jurčić, 2012; Lersch, 2005; Palekčić, 2005, 2009; Previšić, 2007a; Šoljan, 2007; Wacker, Rohlfs, & Kramer, 2013; Wacker & Strobel-Eisele, 2013), which is characteristic of the European tradition of didactics. Educational standards are learning outcomes in the form of competencies that all students at a particular educational level should achieve, which is examined by external evaluation (esp. international tests of learner knowledge) and strongly supported by the international education policy (Meyer, 2005; Palekčić, 2005; Terhart, 2005).

3. The German didactics tradition is based on the German term „Bildung“, which is difficult to translate in English. Hudson (2007) dealed with that problem and described „Bildung“ as „an elusive concept to capture in English“. It has variously been translated as ‘formation’, ‘education’ and ‘erudition’(...).Westbury (2000) suggests that ‘formation’ is the best English translation to capture the German sense of the term. In its turn, Bildung can be seen to be a state of being that can be characterized by a cluster of attributes described by terms such as ‘educated’, ‘knowledgeable’, ‘learned’, ‘literary’, ‘philosophical’, ‘scholarly’, and ‘wise’.“ (p. 136) For better understanding, we use the common term of education instead of Bildung, but always keep in mind the considerations of Hudson and Westbury.

4. This research was conducted within the writing of the unpublished doctoral thesis titled The usability of didactic models in the standardization of education, defended in 2017 at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Croatia (Matanović, 2017).

5. It should be noted that the majority of students (N = 113 or 75.33%) was between 21 and 23 years old. However, 35 or 23.33% of students was between 24 and 29 years old, while 2 students were aged 39 and 55, which shifted their average age to higher values, but does not necessarily reflect the real situation regarding the age of this sub-sample. Given the fact that none of the older students had previous experience in teaching, we decided to include their evaluations of models in the analysis.

6. This decision was made for the purpose of comparing our results with the results of the original study, due to the fact that the authors of the original scale also conducted a factor analysis on the Perspective Schema Model (Ćatić, 2016).