Date of Award:

5-1972

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Department:

School of Teacher Education and Leadership

Department name when degree awarded

Curriculum Development and Supervision

Committee Chair(s)

Walter L. Saunders

Committee

Walter L. Saunders

Committee

Ross Allen

Committee

Arden Frandsen

Committee

Neville Hunsaker

Committee

Terrance Hatch

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effect of microteaching upon pre-service teacher attitudes and the acquisition of certain teaching skills. It was hypothesized that (i) microteaching would have an effect upon the acquisition of certain teaching skills, (ii) microteaching would have an effect upon pre-service teacher attitudes, (iii) particular attitudes would be significant on subsequent acquisition of certain teaching skills, and (iv) there would be a correlation between change of teacher attitudes and the change in certain teaching skills following a microteaching program.

The subjects were students of varying class levels and academic majors enrolled in an introductory education course at Utah State University during the winter and spring quarters in 1971. The students routinely enrolled in one of the two courses offered. The students were then randomly divided into four treatment groups, two in the winter quarter and two in the spring quarter. The two groups in the winter quarter participated in microteaching using Minicourse 9, which is an auto-instructional program designed by the Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development. In one of the winter groups microteaching was done using pupils from a local junior high school, North Cache Junior High. In the other winter quarter group peers played the role of pupils in the microteaching. In one of the two spring quarter groups microteaching was done using pupils from North Cache Junior High School. In the other spring quarter group neither microteaching or Minicourse 9 materials were used, but instead the students were involved in lecture-discussion classes where the primary topics were asking questions and discussion techniques.

Measurements on attitudes and certain teaching skills were made the first and the last weeks of the quarter. Attitudes were measured using the Minnesota Teacher Attitude Inventory. The teaching skills were measured during a microteaching lesson which was video taped and later scored by trained raters. The teaching skills identified were the use of higher order questions and the use of probing questions. The attitude measure at the beginning of the quarter was used to determine an attitude trichotomy so that a subject was classified into one of three attitude levels - high, medium, or low.

The basic experiment design of the study was a pre-test-post-test design. Three statistical procedures were employed to determine the significance of the null hypotheses. These statistical procedures were the t-test, covariance analysis, and Pearson product-moment correlation.

The results indicated (i) that microteaching did have a positive effect upon the acquisition of certain teaching skills, (ii) that microteaching did help improve pre-service teacher attitudes, (iii) that pre-service teacher attitudes just prior to an introductory education class did not correlate with changes in acquired teaching skill, (iv) that there was an interaction between the kind of microteaching instruction and the attitude level of a student when considering acquisition of certain teaching skills, and (v) that there was no correlation between change in attitude scores and change in teaching skill scores during the quarter for any group.

The following implications are suggested in light of the results of the investigation: (i) Microteaching during an introductory class can help in the acquisition of some teaching skills. Other teaching skills may be improved but not significantly. (ii) Micro teaching has a favorable effect upon pre-service teacher attitudes as measured by the Minnesota Teacher Attitude Inventory. Teacher educators who desire to improve the attitudes of their students during instruction should consider microteaching as a possible innovation to achieve this desire. (iii) Pre-service teachers with low attitudes do not acquire certain teaching skills as well as pre-service teachers with high attitudes during an introductory education class. (iv) If microteaching is used as an instructional technique then the difference between the acquisition of the teaching skills for high and low attitude levels is diminished. Microteaching, therefore may represent a better technique for dealing with low attitude students than a traditional lecture-discussion technique of instruction.

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