Learning Environments in Higher Vocational Education Institutions in Mainland China: Evidence From Classroom Observations

• In Event: Teaching Quality, Teacher-Student Interactions, and Reflections-in-Action: Evidence From Different Educational Sectors in China

Abstract

Objectives
This paper aims to explore vocational students’ learning patterns in the changing classroom learning environment and teaching practices concerning effective teacher behavior. It also addresses the importance of understanding vocational classroom dialogue by analyzing qualitative class observations.

Theoretical framework
The study was rooted in the activity theory (Engeström,1999), which emphasizes the interaction of human activity within its relevant environmental context. Activity theory as a framework was applied in designing constructivist learning environments (Jonassen & Rohrer-Murphy, 1999), which provides a different lens for analyzing learning processes in the changing learning environments on activities that students are engaged in the context of Chinese higher vocational education.

Methods
A mixed methods design integrates quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection as well as analyses. Video-taped lesson observations were used to analyze students’ interactive learning, teacher-student classroom interaction, and the change of students’ learning environments that embedded in the vocational pedagogy. Two observation instruments, the International Comparative Analysis of Learning and Teaching (ICALT) instrument (Van de Grift, 2007; 2014) and the Comparative Analysis of Effective Teaching and Inspiring Teaching (CETIT) instrument (Ko et al., 2019), were employed to evaluate the quality of a lesson in terms of six aspects of effective teaching and five aspects of inspiring teaching respectively, assuming these aspects occur independently. Mean scores of two instruments were employed to rank the percentiles of the sixty lessons (Figure 1). Four outliers, marked in red, were selected to conduct an in-depth qualitative dialogue analysis (e.g., Hennessy et al., 2015) to explore the teacher-student interactions. Table 1 and Table 2 below shows a three-minute excerpt of a mechanic engineering lesson which highlights the collaborative learning of the students.

Data sources
A sample of sixty observations was made up of three lessons of twenty teacher participants of four different subject areas at two selected higher vocational colleges in Guangdong province in China. The ICALT instrument consists of thirty-two descriptive statements of generic teaching behaviors in six observable domains for evaluating the teaching quality of a lesson on a 4-point Likert scale. Twenty-six 5-point Likert-scaled items covering five aspects of inspiring teaching in the CETIT instrument were employed.

Results and conclusions
Through both systematic observation instruments (ICALT & CETIT), teachers’ scores of selected lesson observations showed relatively high means and small standard deviations, suggesting that vocational teachers in the sample demonstrated teaching behaviors and practices associated with high-quality teaching. Qualitative dialogic teaching analysis of four purposely selected lessons suggests that vocational teachers used informal approaches to some aspects of their classroom practices, such as small group teaching of vocational skills and lesson activities that connected to real-life situations.

Significance
As the first classroom observation study of vocational education in the literature, this study contributes to the development of vocational learning theory and practice by enhancing our knowledge of student learning patterns, teaching practices, and their respective learning environments in the vocational education context. It also informs practitioners of the importance of vocational learning competence embedded in the delivery of vocational education curricula.

Author

• Yanmin Zhao, The Education University of Hong Kong