The Future of Education

As we want the students to be able to analyze and work with information, it is necessary to enhance such competence of the potential teachers in particular [1,2,3]. The "teacher as researcher" is becoming synonymous with the "teacher as professional", who keeps track in self-development [4] and is involved in research. Therefore, we have conducted a content analysis [5] to find out the methodology level of would-be biology teachers theses, because we believe such an analysis is one of the possible ways of gaining an idea about the success of future teachers' preparation. We analyzed all theses (n = 199) defended at both departments that prepare biology teachers in Prague, Czech Republic in years 2014-2016. We identified 80 main or supplementary pieces of research, mainly quantitative (77%), the most frequently used tool for acquiring data was a questionnaire (61%). Although many of these researches were methodologically acceptable, we found a large number of fundamental methodological misconduct – 41% cases does not specify the method of sampling, 90% questionnaire based researches use newly constructed research tool and 61% of them were done without pilot tool verification; 62% of researches presents data without even basic statistical processing. We believe there should be an action to improve the current situation to be able to fulfill an idea of "teacher as professional".

Keywords: would-be teacher education, biology, thesis, research methodology, pedagogical research;

References:
[1] Younès, T. (2000). Biological education: Challenges of the 21 st Century. Biology International, 39, 8–13.
[2] Hine, G. S. C. (2013). The importance of action research in teacher education programs. Issues in Educational Research, 23(2), 151–163.
[3] Koenig, K., Schen, M. & Bao, L. (2012). Explicitly targeting pre-service teacher scientific reasoning abilities and understanding of nature of science through an introductory science course. Science Educator; Johnson City, 21(2), 1–9.
[4] Fueyo, V. & Koorland, M. A. (1997). Teacher as researcher: A synonym for professionalism. Journal of Teacher Education, 48(5), 336–344.
[5] Janštová, V., & Novotný, P. (2017). Didaktický výzkum jako součást závěrečných prací studentů učitelství biologie [Pedagogical Research as a Part of Pre-service Biology Teachers’ Theses]. Scientia in educatione, 8(2).