How pre-service teachers internalize the link between research literacy and pedagogy

ABSTRACT

Enabling pre-service teachers to develop a critical view of their practice and to acquire the higher order inquiry skills necessary for pedagogic research has been and continues to be a challenge. The present study presents a unique intervention in the training of pre-service teachers in research literacy (RL) skills using a Problem Based Learning (PBL) approach. The intervention is implemented in two different Learning Communities (LC), one online and the other blended. Both immediate and long-term effects of PBL are investigated as are the effects of social and direct scaffolding within the LCs. The study focuses on transmitting the following RL skills: identifying and defining a problem, formulating a research question, and designing a research method. The findings indicate an immediate effect upon all RL skills in both LCs. The long-term effect appears only in the online LC and only for two RL skills: identifying and defining problems. Additionally, there is greater use of social scaffolding in formulating and designing a research study in the online LC than in the blended learning community. Those findings are then interpreted in terms of retention capacity and scaffolding in blended and online LCs.

Keywords:

• Problem-Based Learning
• research literacy
• ​pre-service teachers
• learning community