Factors Influencing Entering Teacher Candidates’ Preferences for Instructional Activities: A glimpse into their orientations towards teaching

Abstract

The present study was designed to identify and characterize the major factors that influence entering science teacher candidates’ preferences for different types of instructional activities, and to analyze what these factors suggest about teacher candidates’ orientations towards science teaching. The study involved prospective teachers enrolled in the introductory science teaching course in an undergraduate science teacher preparation program. Our analysis was based on data collected using a teaching and learning beliefs questionnaire, together with structured interviews. Our results indicate that entering science teacher candidates have strong preferences for a few activity types. The most influential factors driving entering science teacher candidates’ selections were the potential of the instructional activities to motivate students, be relevant to students’ personal lives, result in transfer of skills to non‐science situations, actively involve students in goal‐directed learning, and implement curriculum that represents what students need to know. This set of influencing factors suggests that entering science teacher candidates’ orientations towards teaching are likely driven by one or more of these three central teaching goals: (1) motivating students, (2) developing science process skills, and (3) engaging students in structured science activities. These goals, and the associated beliefs about students, teaching, and learning, can be expected to favor the development or enactment of three major orientations towards teaching in this population of future science teachers: “motivating students,” “process,” and “activity‐driven.”

Keywords:

• Pedagogical content knowledge
• Pre‐service
• Teacher beliefs
• Orientations towards teaching
• Teacher thinking

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Dr Erika Offerdahl for her work on the organization of the data collected using the Teaching and Learning Beliefs Assessment Instrument and Dr Jessica Summers and Sanlyn Buxner for their advice on the statistics used in the study. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (DUE 0088046) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI 71195‐521304).