Pedagogical knowledge base: A conceptual framework for teacher admission
Introduction
In the context of the Iranian higher education, tests and written examinations are the main instruments for selection into graduate language teacher education programs. Within the Iranian central system of educational administration, many applicants follow a year or two of intensive preparation for taking the national university entrance exam held each year. According to the latest census from the Educational Measurement and Evaluation (EME), the agency in charge of both undergraduate and graduate admission exams in Iran, around 10,000 applicants compete for less than 1000 places in graduate programs of English Language Teaching (ELT) annually. With the admission ratio of less than 10%, key stakeholders, including teacher educators, administrators, and various national examination committees, are obliged to ensure that the measurement instruments used in such high-stakes assessments have the required degree of validity and trustworthiness.
In screening candidates for graduate programs of ELT, the EME uses multiple-choice test batteries as its main assessment instrument. These test batteries are designed by Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in the domains deemed significant to the future practices of the prospective teachers. Consulting with SMEs in planning, administration and evaluation of screening tests, the EME aims to identify ‘innovative and scientific’ methods of screening/assessment that can test the accumulated knowledge and dispositions of candidates, and thus select the most qualified graduate students. To design valid and accurate screening tests, the EME collaborates with academics in the related fields in different universities and institutes of higher education across the country. In so doing, the EME aims to draw on the knowledge and expertise of SMEs in the design and administration of its screening exams.
To date, no study has examined the validity of screening tests for graduate programs that test the professional knowledge of pre-admission graduate students in ELT. In the absence of such research, the present study aims to show the extent to which knowledge studies in teaching can be used for teacher screening in graduate programs of teacher education. The rationale for the study is that understanding knowledge base of teachers and its various dimensions can provide the necessary theoretical basis for achieving more reliable and valid methods of teacher recruitment. In addition to its theoretical contribution, this research is particularly important for contexts which have a competitive ELT teacher recruitment process through tests and exams. The next section of this paper reviews recent developments in the studies of teaching and teaching knowledge in order to show how conceptualizations of teaching have evolved from somewhat simplistic behavioral interpretations to more cognitive and situated understandings.
Section snippets
Studies of teachers' knowledge
Freeman (2002) names the 1970s as the decade of change in the study of teaching and teachers' knowledge. Prior to the 70s, teaching was mostly defined in behavioral terms. The agency of teachers, as well as their internal thought processes, was mostly ignored and “the teacher, then, was viewed as a doer, as an implementer of other people's ideas – about curriculum, methodology, and even about how students learned” (Freeman, 2002, p. 5). However, the behaviorist quest for ‘effective teaching
Teacher screening
The late 1980s marks a growing recognition of the ethical dimensions and social consequences of test use in applied linguistics (Bachman, 1995, Bachman, 2000, Bachman and Palmer, 2000, Lynch, 1997, Messick, 1989, Messick, 1996, Shohamy, 1997). During this period, issues of fair assessment and appropriate implementation were debated by testing specialists and applied linguists (Alderson & Banerjee, 2002). Coinciding with the renewed interest in fair assessment was the realization that developing
The present study
Although many studies have examined teacher qualities in ELT (Darling-Hammond, 2006, Darling-Hammond and Youngs, 2002, Kucukturan, 2011, Rice, 2003, Wayne and Youngs, 2003), there is no study, to the best of our knowledge, that has investigated the knowledge base on which pre-service teachers are selected for graduate teacher training programs. In the absence of how knowledge studies in teaching can contribute to teacher selection/recruitment, this paper builds on earlier suggestions to find a
Method
A mixed-method research design was used to answer the study's research questions. We used a mixed-method approach to substantiate our findings through a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods of investigation (Maxcy, 2003). We first used the findings of language teacher cognition research to construct a conceptual framework for pedagogical knowledge in ELT. After constructing our tentative framework, we then examined the high-stakes graduate admission exams in TEFL in Iran against
EFL teachers
The first group of participants in this study consisted of six EFL teachers (teachers A, B, C, D, E and F hereafter) with BA degrees in English. We looked into the pedagogical knowledge base of these practicing teachers with initial teaching experience and offered their pedagogical knowledge base as a framework for the later analyses in this study. Of these six participants, five were male and one female with initial teaching experience ranging from two to three years. Four of the teachers had
Phase one: pedagogical knowledge categories
In phase one, the pedagogical knowledge base of the participating EFL teachers was probed using Stimulated Recall Technique (SRT), one of the most appropriate techniques for examining teachers' interactive cognitions (Meijer, Beijaard, & Verloop, 2002). SRT has been extensively used in teacher education research to examine teachers' interactive thoughts and decision-making. As an introspective research procedure, SRT uses video prompts to help teachers recall their pedagogical thinking at the
Results and discussion
In this section, we first present our findings as to what constitutes the pedagogical knowledge base of the six EFL teachers. We then look into the construct of pedagogical knowledge underlying the graduate admission exams in TEFL using the findings of the content and construct validity tests. Finally, we examine and discuss the degree of correspondence, or lack thereof, between the pedagogical knowledge base of the EFL teachers and the components/constructs of knowledge tested in the exams.
Conclusion
The aim of this study was to apply research findings on teacher cognition to the selection and certification schemes in teacher education programs. For this purpose, we set what language teachers know and do, i.e., their pedagogical knowledge, as a foundation for test design in graduate programs of teacher education. First, we identified the top categories of knowledge underlying 6 EFL teachers' practices using SRT. These categories of pedagogical knowledge were then used as a tentative
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