The Influence of the Design and Prior Knowledge on the Individual Learning Success of Students

In educational practice, various social forms and instructional methods are employed to organize classroom teaching. Research conducted in the context of general education schools has demonstrated that these forms and methods differ in their effectiveness regarding the development of specific competencies. However, the extent to which such findings can be transferred to commercial vocational colleges remains largely unexplored. The present study therefore compared the social forms of group work and teacher-centred instruction in commercial vocational colleges with respect to their effectiveness in fostering professional competence within the framework of a new teaching unit, while taking students’ prior knowledge into account. The findings indicate that teacher-centred instruction leads to greater individual learning gains than group work when introducing new subject matter to students without prior knowledge. The second hypothesis, that group work promotes greater individual learning success among students with existing prior knowledge compared to teacher-centred instruction, could neither be supported.