Impacting Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes in Pre-service Teacher Education Programs

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday III)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: From baseline assessment to evaluating interventions in teacher education programs focusing on reading and writing instruction in Nigeria and Honduras.

Proposal

We used a framework of “knowledge, skills, and attitudes” to examine the impact of an intervention to improve instruction of literacy pedagogy. Our work with the Teacher Education Institutions (TEI)s was designed to expand knowledge of how pupils learn to read and what are best practices in teaching reading; reshape attitudes toward student teacher training and classroom teaching of reading based on this new knowledge; and ultimately, impact teaching and learning activities in TEI classrooms to better prepare student-teachers for primary instruction. Our premise is that knowledge and attitudes interact with each other to create the impetus for changing one’s practice. Previous research clearly identifies the critical role that teacher knowledge and attitudes play in the transformation of classroom practices (e.g., Akyeampong, 2002; Copp, 2016; Deemer, 2004; Pryor et al., 2012), hence the importance of assessing how knowledge and attitudes toward reading instruction have changed under the project’s pre-service interventions. We consider the capacity of teacher educators to be improved in three major areas of teacher competence: their knowledge of the content area, their skill in recognizing and applying appropriate pedagogy to improve student teacher learning in the classroom, and in their attitude toward the teaching and learning experience. At posttest, teacher educators exhibited statistically significant growth in knowledge (p = .001), skills (p < .001) and attitudes (p = .004) associated with the teaching of early grade literacy. At posttest, student teachers exhibited growth in knowledge (p < .001) and attitudes (p < .001) but showed no change in skills. This may be due to the teacher educators’ comments regarding the need for more time to be allocated to tutorial sessions where student teachers are able to practice instruction in small groups, or it may be due to a lack of meaningful and informative classroom instructional experiences for the student teachers. We feel that our application of the framework teacher “knowledge, skills, and attitude” provides a reasonable measure of sustainable growth for both teacher educators and student teachers at teacher training colleges and other institutions. This presentation will include a more detailed discussion of intervention impacts, including focus group discussion responses and classroom observation findings.

Authors

• Adrienne Barnes, Learning Systems Institute at Florida State University

• Helen N. Boyle, Florida State University

• Stephanie Simmons Zuilkowski, Florida State University