Page 113 - Empowering pre-service teachers through inquiry - Lidewij van Katwijk

Relationship among quality of inquiry, quality of teaching and perceptions toward inquiry
Participants
We used the assessment scores of 650 pre-service primary education teachers, collected during the period 2014–2018. All participants had just graduated from a university of applied sciences in the Netherlands. In total 236 pre-service teachers (15% male, mean age = 23.0 years) completed the questionnaire, titled ‘Perceptions of pre-service teacher research’, for a response rate of 36%, distributed evenly over the four cohorts. As part of this survey, 194 pre-service teachers (80% of respondents) formulated their own most important learning outcomes of pre-service teacher inquiry in an open question.
Instruments and variables
Questionnaire 5 The questionnaire was based on two previous instruments about perceptions of pre-
service teacher research: Van der Linden et al.’s (2012, 2015) questionnaire and the
more general Research Acceptance in Vocational Education Questionnaire (Griffioen,
2018). These instruments have four underlying dimensions, or scales, to measure students’ attitudes, perceptions and self-efficacy.
(1) Value–affective attitude. All items in this scale involve emotions (e.g., ‘I find undertaking inquiry to be dull’ [reverse scored]).
(2) Value–cognitive attitude. This scale indicates if and how the pre-service teachers perceive the importance of pre-service teacher inquiry (e.g., ‘I think conducting research is a good way for me to improve my pedagogical skills’). We added some items about the perceived difficulty of conducting pre- service teacher inquiry.
(3) Self-efficacy toward pre-service teacher inquiry. This scale identifies the degree to which students believe they have learned to undertake pre- service teacher inquiry (e.g., ‘I have learnt enough to independently conduct practitioner research or inquiry in practice’).
(4) Behaviour in the future. The scale items pertain to intentions and expectations to conduct practitioner research or inquiry in a future teaching profession (e.g., ‘I’ll conduct practitioner research in my future job as a teacher to improve my professional teaching practice’). The final questionnaire consisted of 23 Likert-type questions. We measured all items with six-point Likert scales (1 = ‘totally disagree’ to 6 = ‘totally agree’), deliberately eliminating a neutral option. We reverse-scored four negatively formulated items in the analysis (e.g., ‘I don’t think I’ll conduct research to resolve a problem in future’).
111