Learning in vocational education encompasses socialization and internalization. Students have to socialize into a specific vocational community to become familiar with shared knowledge, collective norms, values and beliefs. Subsequently, they have to internalize these knowledge and beliefs into a personal knowledge base (Schaap, De Bruijn, Van der Schaaf, & Kirschner, 2009).

Such a knowledge base is also known as a Personal Professional Theory (PPT). A PPT serves as a frame of reference through which students (i.e., seen as novices) acquire and interpret knowledge. Moreover, a PPT directs, to a more or lesser extent, professional behavior (cf., Eraut, 2004). It is assumed that PPTs develop thought negotiation of meaning. Negotiation of meaning is a dynamic and interactive learning process, in which different dialogue partners (re)construct knowledge and subscribe meaning to it (cf., Gunawerdana, Lowe and Anderson, 1997). Negotiation of meaning requires relatively high mental effort of students as well as specific and adaptive guiding strategies of vocational educators. It is therefore not straightforward that negotiation of meaning leads to intended learning outcomes, such as the improvement of professional performance (Aarkrog, 2005).

To enhance negotiation of meaning, vocational educators need to outperform several guiding activities, mainly characterized by modelling activities (e.g., in the role of an expert) and contingent teaching (e.g., in adaptively guiding students). Contingency and modelling are reciprocally related, because when a vocational educator performs certain modelling activities, they need to do that in a contingent way. This study integrates both activities into a specific guiding strategy, namely contingent modelling. Contingent modelling refers to an interactive guiding strategy, in which a vocational educator uses specific modelling activities that are adapted to the current thinking level of students. Contingent modelling encompasses diagnosing, checking and intervening strategies, such as procedural, conceptual, strategic and meta-cognitive interventions. Via contingent modelling, vocational educators can enhance socialization because they can explicate and clarify knowledge of specific professional situations as well as the relevance of certain professional norms and values in the particular vocational domain (Colley, James, Tedder, & Diment, 2003). In doing so, vocational educators can represent the perspective of vocational communities or specific workplaces (Billett, 2001).

It is expected that contingent modelling enhances the development of students’ PPTs via negotiation of meaning, since it encompass the extension of the content via explicating vocational educators’ knowledge as well as the adaption of vocational educators’ support just to the actual level of the individual students or to the progress of the process of negotiation of meaning. The central questions in this study are 1) Can vocational educators enhance negotiation of meaning through contingent modelling? 2) Is the enhancement of negotiation of meaning by vocational educators’ contingent modelling positively related to the development of students’ PPTs? This study aims to gain insight into the development of students’ PPTs as well as into how this development can be enhanced.

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