RESEARCH IN TEACHER EDUCATION A TREND REPORT : L.C. SINGH, S.P. MALHOTRA
Teacher education today is an integral part of any educational system. Teaching, being both a skill and an art, was found amenable to transmission in the early years of the 19th century. If, for ages, teacher education, per se, was a caste or family affair, it could not afford to remain so after education became a mass movement. Mass literacy goals as well as the emergence of technology transformed the very character of teacher training and its philosophy. The National Policy on Education, 1986, reflects precisely this change in its concept and practice. Now, teacher education is no longer limited to primary or secondary levels of teachers but extends far beyond. The creation of the Academic Staff College under the aegis of the UGC is a case in point. No wonder then that teacher education has emerged as an important area of educational research.
In the four surveys so far, taken together, 410 studies have been identified as belonging to the area of teacher education. Researchers working in this area have brought into their study a wide spectrum of variables. If one has studied selection procedures, another has developed curriculum for teacher education programmes and a third has tried to find out the effect of innovative instructional procedures on teacher effectiveness. This is largely due to the fact that teacher education is a long, complicated series of operations. Each operation, in itself, is an extremely complex set of steps. All these interact almost simultaneously. The institution, the process of admission, training climate, administrative setup, the student- teacher, the personal characteristics of teachers, practice schools- these factors, and quite a few more, are constantly at work in the real setting.
To conduct research in any area in a wholly systematized manner, so as to place it in a gestalt perspective is beyond the ability of any single researcher operating in isolation. This can be said even more specifically about researches in this field. Currently these researches are pursued in isolation with little or no contact with each other; the researchers are isolated in their attempts to transform teacher education. In this situation, it is necessary for the reviewer to superimpose a classificatory system which can help in identifying clusters of variables. A cluster of variables, thus identified, may be called an area of research. Though every cluster of variables will have something or other to do with the remaining clusters, it may be said that they do not completely overlap and hence each has an identity of its own.
Reviews of studies in the area of teacher education have been attempted by Lulla and Singh (1974), Mehrotra (1979), Das and Jangira (1983), Bhatnagar (1980), and Pillay (1987). A synoptic overview of the nature of these reviews would help one to take stock of the researches completed in the area. Lulla and Singh (1974), in their trand report in, 'A Survey of Research in Education' (Buch, 1974), classified teacher education research into six areas, namely, selection criteria; abilities and qualities of the teacher; pre- service and inservice training of teachers; workload, job satisfaction and difficulties experienced by the teachers; procedures and practices of teacher education in India; and personality variables of teachers, In his trend report in the Second Survey of Research in Education, Mehrotra (1979) did the classification differently. Here the varia-
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bles were clustered under contextual, input, process and output categories. In the Third Survey, Jangira (1986) adopted a systems model of classifying (as per Sage, 1974) variables under context- presage-process-product categories. Usage of the terms, context- presage-process-product, instead of input-process-output, has certain advantages for classification of studies. One is that it does not have a bias towards instructional system from which input-process- product suffers. Secondly, the context-presage-process-product approach views teacher education from a systems point of view, taking into consideration the effect of other subsystems (external or internal) on the working of the subsystems of teacher education. Thirdly, it is a more elaborate approach that looks into the effects of internal and external constraints on the stystem and the resistance of the system to them that is, it sees the working of the system in the context of other systems/subsystems.
The present trend report is based on the studies abstracted in the three earlier surveys (Buch 1974, Buch 1979 and Buch 1986) and also 150 additional studies identified for the area in this volume. All these 410 studies done at Ph.D. and project levels have been taken together for identifying emerging trends. No separate classification has been thus worked out for the additional studies separately. This had been done with view to avoiding overlapping and to present a comprehensive view of trends in the area over a substantial period. The studies have been viewed from three points of view-their nature, methodology of research, and a systems approach to teacher education.
NATURE OF STUDIES There are 276 studies at Ph.D. level, and 134 at project level. Out of the Ph.D. studies, 245 are in education, 26 in psychology and six in other disciplines. The most explored area in teacher education is pre-service education, having 248 studies, while 110 studies have been done in in-service education. There are 36 studies that have tried to probe both pre-service and in-service education.
The levels at which teacher education is organized provide another frame of reference for clustering the studies. The detailed picture of five clusters of researches at different levels is given in Tables 19.1, 19.2 and 19.3.
Table 19.1
PERIOD-WISE DISTRIBUTION OF STUDIES DONE AT
DOCTORAL LEVEL AND PROJECT LEVEL
Subjects
Years Educa- Psycho- Socio- Agril. Others Projects Total
tion logy logy Extension
1941-50
1951-60 3 3 6
1961-70 23 6 26 55
1971-80 106 10 3 1 63 183
1980-83 43 4 19 66
1984-37 70 6 2 22 100
Total 245 26 3 1 2 133 410
Table 19.2
PERIOD-WISE AND LEVEL-OF-EDUCATION-WISE
DISTRIBUTION OF STUDIES
Levels
Years Pre- Primary Secondary Higher Technical Total
Primary Secondary Education
1941-50
1951-60 2 3 1 6
1961-70 1 16 33 4 1 55
1971-80 15 135 32 1 183
1981-83 10 45 10 1 66
1984-87 1 7 67 22 3 100
Total 2 50 283 68 7 410
Tables 19.1, 19.2 and 19.3 include data indicating period-wise growth of research work at pre-primary, primary, secondary, higher and technical teacher education levels. It may be noted that up to 1950 no work had been done in this area. Even up to 1960, the very little work that was done which was restricted to education of primary, secondary and technical teachers. In the years, 1961-70, there was a slight change and the researchers began to work in areas of pre- primary and
RESEARCH IN TEACHER EDUCATION-A TREND REPORT 901
Table 19.3
PERIOD-WISE AND AREA-WISE DISTRIBUTION OF STUDIES
Years Educa- Psycho- Socio- Agri Others Total
tion logy logy Extension
1941-50
1951-60 6 6
1961-70 48 7 55
1971-80 169 7 3 1 183
1981-83 62 4 66
1984-87 93 5 1 1 100
Total 378 26 4 1 1 410
higher teacher education also. After 1980, there has been a spurt in researches in the area, of teacher education and 183 studies pertaining to different levels of teacher education were conducted. In a span of four years (1984-87), 100 studies were conducted in teacher education at all levels. Again, the explored area was sec- ondary teacher education. The same can be observed from the overall picture depicted by Tables 19.1, 19.2 and 19.3: that the most favoured area with researchers has been secondary teacher education and the most neglected one, pre-primary teacher education. This trend suggests that researchers need to explore areas of teacher education, other than secondary education, also.
A close scrutiny of the projects reveals that the NCERT has been a pioneer agency that took up 62 per cent of the projects completed in. teacher education. This institution also laid more stress on projects in secondary teacher education and much less on pre-primary and primary teacher education. Other institutes that have followed the NCERT in completing a number of projects in teacher education are the SCERTs. Out of these, the SCERTs of Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh are more prominent. Their areas of concern have been elementary and secondary teacher education. Technical Teachers Education Institutions took up projects on teacher education of polytechnic teachers. The least explored area of teacher education at the project-level has been teacher education for college and university teachers. The university departments of education need to explore this field.
METHODOLOGY Another way of classifying the studies could be by the methodology followed by the researchers. Different researchers followed different research procedures according to the nature of the problem selected by them. The major purpose of most of the studies has been determination of the status of the variables. Next in the rank comes prediction of the variables. Determination of the causes occupies third position. Cross-cultural studies constitute 40 per cent and longitudinal studies six per cent of the total. Among the different methods of research followed, nearly 49 per cent can be classified as survey studies, 26 per cent as experimental, eight per cent as case studies, nine per cent as historical, and six per cent as exploratory studies. There are only two studies that had a review of the literature in teachers education as their major objective. In most of the studies, students of different courses and teachers formed the controlled factors studied under higher education. In secondary teacher education, the controlled factors were student teachers, teacher educators, students, parents of students, supervisors and learning material. In primary teacher education, elementary classes, teachers of primary schools, and curriculum of primary teacher education programmes are the controlled factors. Researchers have paid little attention to developmental and evaluation studies. There is a need to go in for such studies so as to provide guidelines for future teacher-education programmes.
Sample The researchers have selected their samples mainly from locations where they were pursuing their research, though not in the case of cross-cultural and comparative studies. Depending upon the location of the university, institution, investigator, purpose of the study and so on, samples have been drawn from different parts of the country. The population, for different types of sample, has been educational institutions, teachers, students, student-teachers, teacher-educators, supervisors, pupils, headmasters or principals, administrators, etc. The size of the sample varied according to the nature of the population. In the case of pupils; sample size in some cases has been as large as 3000, and in case of administrators as low as five. In general, sample size varied from ten to 1000, according to the nature of the subjects/participants in the studies. The methodology of drawing the sample happens to be simple randomiza-
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tion, multi-stage randomization, stratified sampling, random stratified, clustered, etc., depending upon the nature of the related population and the purpose of the study. The variations in samples, the size and methodology of sampling, have been very wide. Because of this variability in sample size, characteristics of the sample and methodology employed for selecting the sample, generalizations cannot be easily drawn from the findings of the studies.
Tools Employed The questionnaire and the observation scale are the commonest among the tools used by the, researchers. Other tools included personal data sheets, interview schedules, check lists and institutional records. In the case of questionnaires, 16 PF has been the most widely used for measuring personality and, in the case of observation scales, the Baroda General Teaching Competence Scale has been put to maximum use by researchers. Most of them have used available standardized tools in their studies. They have also developed their own tools and standardized them. These have been mainly concerned with questionnaire, observation schedule, interview schedule, etc. In the process of standardization of the tools, they followed the usual prescribed procedures like item analysis, finding out reliability and validity. In some cases, they have gone in for establishing norms also.
Statistical Techniques Employed During the analysis of data, researchers have made use of raw scores and only rarely converted them into standard scores. Depending upon the methodology used in the study, the researchers have made use of correlation, factor analysis, regression and prediction, analysis of variance, analysis of covariance, t-test, chi-square, sign test, etc. along with measures of central tendency and dispersion. The most favoured statistical tools have been parametric tests. Non-parametric tests did not find much favour with investigators. The experimental studies have made use of pre-experimental and experimental designs. Among the most experimental designs have been simple pre-test, post- test designs with one treatment and one control group. Factor analytical studies have aimed at identifying factors implicit in the structure of relationship between different variables pertaining to different individuals. Regression studies have aimed at establishing multiple regression equations and multiple correlations between predictors like personality traits, teaching skills and criteria like teaching competence, examination marks in theory and practice teaching, etc.
SYSTEMS APPROACH TO TEACHER EDUCATION Keeping in view the advantages of a systems approach, the present trend report is based on studies identified in the area of teacher education and done at both Ph.D. and project levels. Teacher education has been viewed here from a systems approach point of view and the studies have been categorized as context-presage-process- product studies. Because of overlapping and also because of the researchers studying variables belonging to different categories, this trend report is presented under different combinations of these categories. The major headings of the trend report are context studies, presage studies, context-presage studies, presage-process studies, context-product studies, and process-product studies.
(i) The Context.Studies This area of research in teacher education covers studies on institutional characteristics, student-teacher characteristics, teacher characteristics, and classroom context. The institutional- characteristics-related variables are the climate obtaining in teacher-education institutions, administrative set-up, etc. Under student-teacher characteristics, studies pertain to one or more variables, viz., student-teacher formative experiences, their academic qualifications, abilities, personality factors, intelligence, etc. The studies concerned with teacher characteristics have variables like personality traits, self-concept, job expectation, role expectancy, role performance, etc. Classroom context studies include certain classroom variables such as classroom climate, size of the classroom and curriculum at teacher training and practising school level. The trend of the context studies is presented here according to this classification.
(a) Institutional Context In this category are clustered those studies that have traced the growth of teacher education in their respective geographical regions, viz. states, districts, etc. Other types of studies surveyed the institutions with re-
RESEARCH IN TEACHER EDUCATION-A TREND REPORT 903
spect to their admission procedure, number of student-teachers enrolled, facilities available, etc. Such studies have their value on two counts. One is that they help in understanding the present problems in teacher education programmes and the other is that they indicate the extent of achievement and scope of improvement.
(i) INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT-