Building an evidence-base for ITE in NIE: A bridging project

In 2009, a project—OER 13/09 LEL Building an Evidence-base for ITP in NIE: A Formative Project—was funded to initiate a program of research activities that seeks to achieve a rich and contextualised understanding of the nature, substance and professional impact of student teachers’ learning within NIE’s ITE programmes. This project was a further formative step on that journey, and had four related purposes/objectives.

The first involved the extension of work begun in OER 13/09 LEL involving the making of video observations of classroom pedagogical practices, and the subsequent coding of those. The intention was to extend this work to include representative samples of teaching in Academic Subject (AS) courses.

The second was to support the work of the TE21 implementation steering group (ISG), through mapping of student teachers’ perceptions of the contribution that their program makes to the development/achievement of the V3SKs and GTCs. A new survey, the Perceptions of Programme Coverage and Achievement on V3SK and GTCs Survey, was developed for this purpose.

The third involved an extension of data collection to involve the use of interviews. These interviews sought to understand how student teachers’ attitudes, beliefs and values were engaged during their PGDE experiences, and the impact of those engagements on participants’ ‘teacher identity’.

The fourth purpose involved improvement of the research processes and tools, in anticipation of their use in subsequent research.