Investigating the relation between pre-service teachers' argumentative writing and knowledge integration when learning with multiple texts

Recent research shows that learning tasks which require students to consult multiple sources and write an argumentative essay promote the cognitive integration of knowledge and ideas presented in the source documents. This study examines whether this holds true in pre-service teacher education, which asks for an integration of knowledge and ideas from conceptually distinct and mainly separately taught knowledge domains (i.e., content knowledge (CK), pedagogical knowledge (PK), and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK)). Forty-six pre-service teachers received domain-specific textbook excerpts, each representing either CK, PK, or PCK, and an argument writing task. The students read the texts and wrote argumentative essays on how the content provided in the source documents is related as regards teaching. Using structural and analytic methods to investigate the argumentative essays it was found that students’ argumentative writing was related to knowledge integration across domains. The generation and inclusion of warrants and the developed connectivity and causality in students’ essays appeared particularly important for their knowledge integration. The findings are discussed with regard to how certain instructional scaffolds can support pre-service teachers’ argumentative reasoning/writing to enhance knowledge integration across domains. Some directions for future research are drawn.