Session Information
02 SES 06 B, Teachers & Trainers II: Perceptions & Reflections on Learning
Paper Session
Contribution
The topic of this year’s ECER conference is “Education in an Era of Risk – the Role of Educational Research for the Future”. We see that the topic of this study, 21st century skills, is of vital importance for future vocational students, teachers and practitioners. Therefore, we need also more research focusing on these skills.
The importance to learn 21st century skills has been recognized internationally. Meanwhile, teacher’s role of transmitting the skills to students to equip them facing future challenges in job and society is addressed. The objective of the study is to explore the vocational teacher students’ perceptions on the 21st century skills and applications of these skills to their teaching practices. The study is part of an international research project led by Professor Hannele Niemi at the University of Helsinki, Finland. This proposal reports an ongoing study from Sweden.
The conceptual framework is based on Ravitz’s (2014) work focusing on 21st century teaching and learning. In this study the 21st century skills involve eight areas: critical thinking, collaboration, communication, creativity and innovation, self-management/self-regulation, making global connections, making local connections and using technology as a tool for learning. Critical thinking refers, among other issues, to students being able to analyze complex problems, collaboration states that students are able to work together and communication denotes sharing ideas and issues. Creativity and innovation describes how students can generate and refine solutions, for example, self-direction talks about students’ ability to take responsibility of their learning. Global connections take into account students’ ability to understand global and geo-political issues whereas local connection refers to their ability to work with the community. Using technology as tool for learning focuses on students’ ability to use appropriate information and communication technologies. (Ravitz, 2014)
The research questions are the following: How do vocational teacher students perceive 21st century skills, and to what degree do vocational teacher students apply 21st century skills to their teaching? What are the challenges of applying the 21st century skills?
Method
The study presented here uses mix methods strategy. Study materials were collected by a quantitative survey to vocational teacher students and by qualitative interviews with vocational teacher students. The questionnaire was based on work done by Ravitz (2014), Schmidt, Baran, Thompson, Mishra, Koehler and Shin (2009) and Sahin (2011), and developed further by Hannele Niemi’s group, whose questionnaire was translated to Swedish. The survey used Likert-scale questionnaire, scored 1-5 (from very disagee to very agree). The questionnaire included two parts: learned from the program and application to teaching for each eight skills. Before sending it to VET teacher students 5 Swedish speaking persons answered the questionnaire and gave feedback about its clarity and language. The semi-structured interview questions focused on deepening the vocational teacher students’ perceptions of the 21st century skills and their application to teaching practice. Interview questions were, for example, asking What are the most important 21st century skills in teacher’s work? What could be the barriers or obstacles in learning 21st century skills during VET teacher education?
Expected Outcomes
We have preliminary findings from the questionnaire but not yet from the interviews. 34 VET teacher students answered the questionnaire. Their professional backgrounds were as following: Child and recreation, Vehicle and transport, Business and administration, Handicraft, Hotel and tourism, Natural resource use, Restaurant and food and Health and social care. The reliability (Cronbach’s Alpha) of the questionnaire is 0,965, and the reliability of the 8 skills are 0,790-0,869: critical thinking (0,823), collaboration (0,790), communication (0,809), creativity & innovation (0,801), self-management/self-regulation (0,854), making global connections (0,865), making local connections (0,869) and using technology as a tool for learning (0,878). Based on descriptive quantitative analysis, it was found that the participants were positive on 7 out of 8 skills (scored 3.45 to 3.88) on the skills learned from the programme and applied in teaching in general and only the skill of making global connections was scored lowest below 3 (2.86). When we tried to compare the scores from skills learned from the program and applied to teaching, there were 4 skills of communication, creativity & innovation, making local connections and using technology as a tool for learning found more positive in the application to teaching compared to learned from the programme. However, there was no significant difference (p<0.05) found in all the comparison of means via Paired T-test. In the global age, it is important to connect every educational program locally and internationally. However, in our study, we found the participants’’ responses on the skill of making globally connections less positive compared to other skills.
References
Ravitz, J. (2014). A Survey for Measuring 21st Century Teaching and Learning: West Virginia 21st Century Teaching and Learning Survey [WVDE-CIS-28]. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289377968_A_survey_for_measuring_21st_century_teaching_and_learning_West_Virginia_21st_Century_Teaching_and_Learning_Survey_WVWV-CIS-28 Schmidt, D. A., Baran, E., Thompson, A. D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M. J., & Shin, T. S. (2009). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK), Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 42:2, 123-149, DOI: 10.1080/15391523.2009.10782544 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2009.10782544 Sahin, I. (2011). Development of survey of technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK). The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology, 10:1, 97–105. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ926558.pdf
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