Student IT Teachers’Pedagogical Beliefs and Instructional Design Practices
Author(s):
Emine Şendurur (presenting / submitting) Polat Şendurur
Conference:
ECER 2014
Format:
Paper

Session Information

10 SES 10 C, Load and Strain: Observations and Pedagogical Practices

Paper Session

Time:
2014-09-04
15:30-17:00
Room:
B226 Sala de Aulas
Chair:
Gerry Czerniawski

Contribution

Almost any type of teacher education institutions are constructed upon two objectives besides such objectives as social enhancement. The first one is to equip students with theoretical knowledge of both pedagogy and content. The second aim is to provide students appropriate environments enabling to transfer their theoretical knowledge into experience. Unlike theoretical parts, providing experiences is considerably challenging both for students and teachers. Project-based instructional design practices, micro teaching experiences, etc. can be considered as opportunities to learn and practice spontaneously. As students gain knowledge and experience, they are supposed to become mature for teaching at real settings. That is why, the last academic year offers two courses named “School Experience”and “Teaching Practice”. While the former course requires the observation of the mentor teacher, the latter one requires preparing for a real class and teaching real topics within the real classroom. Such an exciting experience can be a valuable way either to evaluate oneself or to deal with the real surprises caused by imperfect settings of schools.

 

Introducing pedagogical information to information technology (IT) teachers is important, because their initial tool (computer) can become valuable for transfer of their constructivist pedagogical beliefs (Becker, 2000). This does not mean that IT teachers never believe in other pedagogical approaches, however, this time the computer can serve as an aim not as a tool. Moreover, espoused and enacted beliefs can differ from each other due to various barriers (Ertmer et. al, 2001), but there are cases surviving no matter how bas the barriers are (Ertmer et. al, 2012).

 

Unlike other teacher education departments, information technology teachers have been trained for instructional design practices in various fields. They can be considered as novice instructional designers in addition to being novice student teachers. Instructional design can be defined as “a construct that refers to the principles and procedures by which instructional materials, lessons, and whole systems can be developed in a consistent and reliable fashion” (Molenda, Reigeluth, &Nelson, 2003, p. 574). Dick and Carey (1996), Kemp, Morison, and Ross (1994), Seels and Glasgow (1997), and Willis and Wright (2000) are well-known instructional design models having different approaches like being linear or iterative. On the other hand, they are very close to ADDIE framework, i.e. their basic components have many aspects in common.

 Since there is a distinct line between being a novice and being an expert, their approaches to cases differs also (Perez & Emery, 1995; Harde, Ge, & Thomas, 2005). One reason for this situation can be the sophisticated nature of instructional design problems (Ertmer & Cennamo, 1995). Many studies clearly indicate that the models are used as reference but pursuing the whole steps or components is not observed in real settings (Rowland, 1992; Kirschner, Carr, van Merrienboer, & Sloep, 2002; Ertmer, York, & Gedik, 2009; Yanchar, South, Williams, Allen, & Wilson, 2010).

 

In the literature, there have been studies separately examining instructional design processes of novice designers and pedagogical beliefs of student teachers, but how they are linked is still unclear. In this study, it was aimed to describe how student teachers’pedagogical beliefs embodied through instructional design practices within real context.

Method

This case study took place in a public elementary school. 20 student IT teachers (7 males; 13 females) participated to the study. They were registered to the course titled “Teaching Practice”offered at the 8th semester. They also took “Instructional Design”course at their 4th semester and “School Experience” at their 7th semester. Since the majority of the students did not have any previous design or teaching experience they can be considered as novices in both fields. Only one student teacher had previous teaching experience, but it is more like special tutoring, not the whole class teaching. In addition to students, there were two mentor teachers per 10 student teachers, and an advisor who is also one of the authors of this paper. In the beginning of the semester, all students were informed about the process and requirements of the course. They regularly attended to the IT courses in the elementary school. Like the previous semester, they sometimes observed the mentor teacher or other student teachers. Unlike school experience course, this one required them to prepare and instruct at least twice, one for the observation of the mentor and other student teachers; one for the observation of the advisor. Students were assigned to create a portfolio including, weekly reflections, lesson plans, activities, evaluations, articles, and any stuff related to their professional development. Data collected through observations, portfolios, and unstructured interviews with students and the mentors. All qualitative data were investigated by two researchers separately for topics of relevance. Categories and subcategories were formed to decide on the overall thematic structure. After ensuring the agreement between researchers, the structure was examined again for the coherence of relations as a whole.

Expected Outcomes

Students’ reflection papers and interviews clearly revealed their espoused pedagogical beliefs. Only two student IT teachers have stated that the authority of the teacher is very crucial for effective lessons. According to them, the teacher should keep control of learning by keeping students silent. They both preferred direct instruction method and gave reinforcement whenever needed. During their lecturing, they spent considerable effort to suppress the noise. In short, these students enacted and espoused beliefs matched clearly. The rest of the students showed different patterns of behaviors. Although almost all of their discourse tended to be blended, the situation was not observed during their teaching performance, except for three students. Students believe in the teacher authority and control, but they also give importance to student-centered methods and context. Nevertheless, some of them failed to practice their blended approaches in real settings. Only three students presented successful practice of blended approach. In terms of instructional design process, no common patterns were examined. Each student teacher has own style, i.e. focus of attention, considerations, problem statement, and approach to solutions varied in combination. On the other hand, one common pattern was observed among those with more constructivist beliefs and practices. They are very sensitive to students’ needs, previous experiences, and alternative strategies, and therefore, their analysis and design processes are different from others. Student teachers with more behaviorist beliefs and practices especially mentioned about how they had difficulties during analysis and implementation phases due to inappropriate seating plans. Almost all of the student teachers explained that they followed the ADDIE phases because of its basic structure, but this was not precise neither in their reflections nor their teaching practices. The match between student IT teachers’ espoused and enacted beliefs, and their instructional design practices will be discussed in details in this section.

References

Becker, H.J. (2000). Findings from the teaching, learning, and computing survey: is Larry cuban right? Educational Policy analysis Archives, 8(51), 1-35. Dick, W., & Carey, L. (1996). The systematic design of instruction. 4th ed. New York, NY: Harper Collin. Ertmer, P. A., Gopalakrishnan, S., & Ross, E. M. (2001). Technology-using teachers: comparing perceptions of exemplary technology use to best practice. Journal of Research on Computing in Education, 33(5), 1-26. Ertmer, P.A., Ottenbreit-Leftwich, A.T., Sadik, O., Sendurur, E., & Sendurur, P. (2012) Teacher beliefs and technology integration practices: A critical relationship. Computers and Education, 59(2), 423-435. Hardre´, P. L., Ge, X., & Thomas, M. K. (2006). A qualitative study of the development of instructional design expertise. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 19(4), 63–90. Kemp, J.E., Morrison, G.R., & Ross, S.M. (1994). Designing Effective Instruction. Merrill: New Jersey. Kirschner, P., Carr, C., van Merrienboer, J., & Sloep, P. (2002). How expert designers design. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 15, 86–104. Molenda, M., Reigeluth, C.M., & Nelson, L.M. (2003). Instructional design. In L. Nadel (Ed.). Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (Vol 2, 574-578). London: Nature Publishing Group. Perez, R. S., & Emery, C. D. (1995). Designer thinking: How novices and experts think about instructional design. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 8(3), 80–95. Rowland, G. (1992). What do designers actually do? An initial investigation of expert practice. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 5(2), 65–86. Seels, B. and Glasgow, Z. (1997). Making Instructional Design Decisions. Columbus, OH: Prentice Merrill. Willis, J. & Wright, K. E. (2000). A general set of procedures for constructivist instructional design: the new R2D2 model. Educational Technology, 40(2), 5–20. Yanchar, S. C., South, J. B., Williams, D. D., Allen, S., & Wilson, B. G. (2010). Struggling with theory? A Qualitative investigation of conceptual tool use in instructional design. Educational Technology Research and Development, 58(1), 39–60.

Author Information

Emine Şendurur (presenting / submitting)
Ondokuz Mayıs University, Turkey
Ondokuz Mayıs University, Turkey

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