Date of Award

2008

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Curriculum, Instruction, and Media Technology

Abstract

Three research questions were examined in this study. The first research question was to determine if an electronic discussion board would be an effective way of generating meaningful and reflective discourse among pre-service teachers. There were a total of 1727 postings from all the pre-service teachers who participated in the study. Of these, 836 postings were from the control group and 891 postings were from the experimental group. Postings that were 80 words or more were identified and then each posting was categorized into one of the three levels of thinking—low, medium or high based on a rubric for evaluation of online discussion prompts and responses. This rubric was used as it was designed based on Bloom's taxonomy and fitted the design of this study. The frequencies of both groups at each of the three levels of thinking—low, medium and high, was used to determine if a discussion board is indeed an effective tool for generating a reflective discourse among pre-service teachers. After the qualitative analysis was done it was found that from the control group, of the 480 postings that were categorized into the three levels, 103 postings were "low" level, 220 were "medium" level and 157 were "high" level. From the experimental group, of the 541 postings that were categorized, 65 were "low" level, 224 were "medium" level and 252 were "high" level. From both groups, of the 1,021 postings that were categorized, 850 postings were identified as being either "medium" or "high" level of thinking. With such high frequencies of postings in the "medium" or "high" levels of thinking, it was concluded that an electronic discussion board is indeed an effective way of generating meaningful and reflective discourse among pre-service teachers. The second research question was to determine if there would be a difference in the number and quality of postings on the discussion board between pre-service teachers from the experimental and the control group. This was analyzed using an independent measures t -test. The independent variable was the group and the dependent variable was the number of postings from each group. The results of the analysis showed no statistically significant difference in the number of postings between the control group and the experimental group. As the pre-service teachers were divided into two groups, the researcher extended the analysis for the second question by doing independent samples t -tests to see if there was a difference in the frequencies of the experimental group and the control group for each of three levels—high, medium and low. Through this analysis, it could be determined if one group was more reflective than the other. Also, the researcher wanted to find out if the presence of in-service teachers in the discussion group and the use of authentic classroom problems instead of topical issues would lead to higher levels of thinking among pre-service teachers. The results of the independent samples t -tests revealed interesting findings. At the high level of thinking, it was found that the experimental group was significantly better compared to the control group. The mean difference among all seven sections was 13.671, indicating that in each section, from the experimental group, about 14 more postings were identified as high" level of thinking as compared to the control group. This was also found to be statistically significant. The use of authentic classroom problems also made an impact indicating that the use of such problems can indeed promote reflective discourse among pre-service teachers. Even though at the "medium" and "low" levels of thinking, there was no statistically significant difference, the statistically significant difference at "high" level of thinking suggests a positive effect with regard to the involvement of in-service teachers in the discussion groups and also the use of authentic classroom problems as prompts for the discussion. The third research question was to determine if the use of authentic classroom problems posted by in-service teachers lead to a difference in the self-efficacy scores of pre-service teachers from the experimental and the control group. This was analyzed using an independent measures t -test. The independent variable was the group (as only the experimental group had the authentic classroom problems and the in-service teachers) and the dependent variable was the overall self-efficacy score. The results of the analysis show that there was no statistically significant difference in the self-efficacy scores of the control group and the experimental group. The mean self-efficacy score of the experimental group was somewhat higher than the mean self-efficacy score of the control group but this difference was not statistically significant and could have been merely due to chance. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

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