Abstract

Teacher education programs that aspire to helping pre-service teachers develop expertise must help students engage in deliberate practice along dimensions of teaching expertise. However, field teaching experiences often lack the quantity and quality of feedback that is needed to help students engage in meaningful teaching practice. The limited availability of supervising teachers makes it difficult to personally observe and evaluate each student teacher's field teaching performances. Furthermore, when a supervising teacher debriefs such an observation, the supervising teacher and student may struggle to communicate meaningfully about the teaching performance. This is because the student teacher and supervisor often have very different perceptions of the same teaching performance. Video analysis tools show promise for improving the quality of feedback student teachers receive in their teaching performance by providing a common reference for evaluative debriefing and allowing students to generate their own feedback by coding videos of their own teaching. This study investigates the reliability of pre-service teacher coding using a video analysis tool. This study found that students were moderately reliable coders when coding video of an expert teacher (49%-68%). However, when the reliability of student coding of their own teaching videos was audited, students showed a high degree of accuracy (91%). These contrasting findings suggest that coding reliability scores may not be simple indicators of student understanding of the teaching competencies represented by a coding scheme. Instead, reliability scores may also be subject to the influence of extraneous factors. For example, reliability scores in this study were influenced by differences in the technical aspects of how students implemented the coding system. Furthermore, reliability scores were influenced by how coding proficiency was measured. Because this study also suggests that students can be taught to improve their coding reliability, further research may improve reliability scores"-and make them a more valid reflection of student understanding of teaching competency-"by training students about the technical aspects of implementing a coding system.

Degree

College and Department

David O. McKay School of Education; Instructional Psychology and Technology

Rights

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