Narrow Results

Despite tremendous progress in the 20th century in increasing life expectancy and spreading freedom and democracy, serious problems of poverty, environmental degradation, gender discrimination, racial and ethnic discord, and social inequality persist in most parts of the world as we enter the 21st century. A dynamic profession of social work, committed internally to knowledge development and to furthering the competence of its members and externally to high quality care giving and to substantive institutional reform, must carve out a role for itself in meeting the great challenge of our time, viz. balancing economic development with social equity.

At the Muenster University, teaching–learning labs have been integrated into teacher education as part of a joint initiative by the German federal and state governments in order to improve the quality of teacher education. Because of the great potential in natural differentiation and the particular challenge in teaching, mathematical modeling was placed at the focus of the teaching–learning lab. The paper deals with the structure of an innovative and supportive learning environment that fosters the diagnostic competence of mathematical modeling as part of the professional competence of pre-service teachers. With the help of a newly developed test instrument, it was shown that the development of modeling-specific diagnostic competence increases significantly and with a large effect size in the teaching–learning lab for mathematical modeling, while no significant changes occur in a control group (CG).