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UPSI Digital Repository (UDRep)
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| Full Text : Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris |
| Teaching practice is an important and compulsory component in the curriculum of the 12 education degree programs offered at Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI). The academic programs offered at UPSI aim at, among others, providing the students with the ingredients necessary for them to develop into effective teachers. Thus general pedagogy and subject matter courses are offered. In addition, methods courses specific to subject matter teaching are also included in some of the programs. The question of what contribution each of these various courses brings to student teachers' performance in teaching practice would be of interest for educators in general and teacher trainers in particular. The purpose of this research was to determine (a) whether each of the factors: subject matter knowledge, general pedagogical knowledge, and specific methods knowledge, individually accounts for or contributes to differences in teaching practice performance; (b) which combination of these factors simultaneously provides the best explanation for or contributes to the performance; and (c) among the significant factors which one has the most impact on the performance. This study involved two academic programs: Teaching of English as Second Language (TESL) and Mathematics. For each program, based on teaching practice performance, two extreme groups of student teachers were formed, one top and one bottom groups. This serves as a dichotomous dependent variable. Student teachers' performances in general pedagogy, subject matter and subject specific methods courses are the three predictor variables considered. Multiple regression analysis was, used to determine the effects of the various factors and their relative II importance towards teaching practice performance. Gender and prior teaching experience are the background variables used. Univariate analysis indicated that for TESL program the top and bottom groups differed significantly in general pedagogical knowledge, subject matter knowledge, and specific methods knowledge. These three types of knowledge jointly explained about 20% of the variation in teaching practice performance (R2 = 19.5). However, specific methods knowledge did not add significantly to the contributions towards differences in teaching practice performance over and above that which was contributed jointly by general pedagogical knowledge and subject matter knowledge. Subject matter knowledge had more impact than general pedagogical knowledge on the differences in teaching practice performance. For Mathematics program, only subject matter knowledge and specific methods knowledge contributed significantly to teaching practice performance. However, subject matter knowledge did not have significant contributions over and above that contributed by specific methods knowledge towards teaching practice performance Thus mastery in mathematics methods had more impact on teaching practice performance than general pedagogical knowledge and subject matter knowledge do. The results suggest that specific mathematics methods knowledge may be more important than pedagogical knowledge as a contributory factor towards teaching practice performance of Mathematics Program. However, for TESL program, subject matter knowledge is a more important determinant of teaching practice performance after the influence of gender and prior teaching experience of students were held constant. III |
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