Page 118 - Empowering pre-service teachers through inquiry - Lidewij van Katwijk

Chapter 5
Table 5.2 Most important learning outcomes of pre-service teacher inquiry, mentioned by responding students (n = 194; # quotes = 208)
Most important learning outcome
Number of mentions
Examples
1. To conduct research (inquiry) 54
2. Knowledge about the subject 44
3. To apply research in practice 41
4. An inquiry habit of mind 34
5. To write academically 15 6. To use literature 12 7. Miscellaneous 8
• ‘To conduct research; to analyse results’
• ‘To realise how much information comes from a good
problem analysis’
• ‘I now know how to identify, observe and register gifted toddlers’
• ‘To know about education in South-Africa’
• ‘To combine literature and practice’
• ‘To find a solution for a practical problem in a structural
way and link this to literature’
• ‘My inquiry habit of mind! And to look objective to research questions’
• ‘To look consciously, be critical, look broadening’
• ‘Academic writing; for example to paraphrase’
• ‘Writing: professionally, short, powerful and creatively’
• ‘To do a literature review autonomously’ • ‘To Search and read literature’
• ‘The importance of having a good supervisor’ • ‘Doing it yourself; individually’
Relationship between pre-service teacher inquiry and teaching
To determine whether the quality of pre-service teacher inquiry was related to pre- service teaching quality, we calculated the bivariate correlation between the scores of pre-service teacher inquiry and the final assessment scores of the pre-service teaching practice (N = 650). We found a significant, positive correlation between the scores on pre-service teacher practice and the scores on pre-service teacher inquiry (r = .224, 95% BCa CI [ .148, .298], p < .001); pre-service teachers who achieved high scores for their pre-service teacher inquiry achieved significantly higher scores for their teacher practice assessment than students who scored lower on pre-service teacher inquiry. To gain a deeper understanding of this relationship and how various pre-service teachers perceive the value of pre-service teacher inquiry, we identified profiles by conducting a cluster analysis.
The cluster analysis performed on the scores for pre-service teacher practice and inquiry (N = 650), was fairly good; the ratio of sizes, largest cluster to smallest cluster, was 1.66. We determined clusters by face validity and statistical cluster quality, resulting in four profiles (see Figure 5.2):
Profile 1, Good practitioners (n = 207; 32%): pre-service teachers who score low on pre-service teacher inquiry (M = 6.3) and high on teaching practice (M = 8.5).
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