Page 88 - Empowering pre-service teachers through inquiry - Lidewij van Katwijk

Chapter 4
group autonomously, for three days a week for 20 weeks, and during this period, they also spend an additional day in the school for their pre-service teacher research. In contrast, the Australian pre-service teachers spend three to six weeks full-time in the school, combining teaching and data collection efforts. All descriptions of pre- service teacher research in the participating programmes emphasise to conduct research most out of the four main aspects, mentioned in the theoretical framework. Characteristics of an inquiry habit of mind are mentioned explicitly in the Dutch programmes, while in the Australian programme this aspect gets less attention.
We invited teacher educators from the four institutions to participate. These informants were directly involved in teaching, supervising, or designing the programme for pre-service teachers that included a component of pre-service teacher research in the final part of the teacher education course. All twenty-six educators, directly engaged with pre-service teacher research in the four institutes, agreed to join the study, by participating in the focus groups (see Table 4.1). The participating teacher educators in each institute invited pre-service teachers to participate in this study about pre-service teacher research, requiring that they were in the final part of their initial teacher education and had finished their pre-service teacher research course requirements. We requested to use no other selection criteria. Information about the amounts of invited pre-service teachers is not available. Seventeen pre-service teachers across the two countries participated in the focus groups (Australia = 6; Netherlands = 11) and another eleven pre-service teachers across the two countries, who were not able to join the focus groups due to the planned times
Table 4.1 Methods and number of participants.
Focus
Method
Australia
The Netherlands
Perception TEs
Perception PSTs
Focus group
Questionnaires Focus group
Questionnaires
Case AU 1 & AU 2 AU 1: 5 TEs
AU 2: 2 TEs
AU 1: 3 TEs AU 2: 2 TEs AU 1: 3 PSTs AU 2: 3 PSTs
AU 1: 6 PSTs AU 2: 10 PSTs
Case NL 1 & NL 2 NL 1: 7 TEs
NL 2: 12 TEs
NL 1: 6 TEs NL 2: 6 TEs NL 1: 8 PSTs NL 2: 3 PSTs
NL 1: 8 PSTs NL 2: 4 PSTs
Note: TEs = teacher educator; PSTs = pre-service teachers.
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