Dan pratt
|
Professor |
Room: Ponderosa Annex G, Room 18 |
Phone: 604-822-4552 |
Fax: 604-822-4244 |
Email: dan.pratt@ubc.ca |
Sample Research Projects
Recent Publications
AERC - 2000 The Teaching Perspectives Inventory:
Developing and Testing an Instrument to Assess
Teaching Perspectives
Rationale
Over a half-century of research has revealed that the teaching
of adults is a complex, pluralistic, and multi-faceted enterprise.
Yet, within the past several years much of the research has
shown a surprisingly high level of correspondence in identifying
qualitatively different perspectives or conceptions on teaching.
In reviewing 13 studies between 1983 and 1996, Kember (1997)
found only five substantively different conceptions of teaching
in higher education. While there may be a great many variations
in personal style, there are relatively few substantively
different ways to conceptualize the teaching of adults. As
well, there have been no published studies that move this
work beyond identification and description toward measurement
and quantitative forms of validation. This paper traces progress
toward developing and operationalizing these perspectives
with a new instrument called the Teaching Perspectives
Inventory (TPI).
Conceptual Framework
This work is grounded in the empirical and conceptual work
of Pratt (1992; 1998). Four of his perspectives closely parallel
conceptions found in Kember’s review. The fifth perspective,
Social Reform, was kept intact for this study because it represented
the views of a small, but important, group of adult educators
involved in social change movements. We have taken these conceptual
categories (perspectives) and translated them into items related
to actions, intentions, and beliefs about learning, teaching,
and knowledge. Progress during the past five years has successfully
operationalized Pratt’s five perspectives into five 9-item
scales: Transmission, Apprenticeship, Developmental, Nurturing,
and Social Reform. We show that these scales possess operational
and functional validity, that teachers can recognize themselves
as holding combinations of one or more of these perspectives,
that teachers of adults commonly possess one (and sometimes
two) dominant perspectives, and that some perspectives (Developmental
and Nurturing) are more widely held than others (Social Reform).
Instrument Development
Instrument development has evolved through three successive
stages: a 75-item, 6-point scale version, a 45-item, 5-point
scale version, and a 30-item paired comparison version. In
1993, an original pool of nearly one hundred items was reviewed
and refined by a panel of trained adult educators, acting
as judges, who tested them against the conceptual framework;
inter-judge reliability in assigning items to the correct
conceptual perspective was .87. The resulting 75 items were
initially drafted into 6-point Likert-scale formats for response
by 471 teachers of adult night school learners. Item analyses
confirmed high test-retest reliabilities (.88) and internal
scale consistencies (alpha) (.79). Factor analyses showed
that the internal structure among the items corroborated the
scale scoring as posited by the item development procedures
with correlations between factor scores and scale scores averaging
.77 Of these teachers, 63% possessed one clearly dominant
perspective and another 31% showed two dominant perspectives
(Chan, 1994).
Subsequently in 1997, a new group of eighteen adult educators
reviewed a reduced and refined set of 45 items and classified
them into the appropriate perspectives with over 95% accuracy.
Their review indicated that the instrument could be further
shortened without loss of precision. This 45-item streamlined
version has been further tested on more than 20 groups of
teachers of adults in law, pharmacy, dietetics, workforce
training, nursing, industry, fitness, as well as adult education
graduate students and in locations spanning Canada, the United
States and Singapore (Pratt and Collins, 1999). These 600+
respondents confirm the high internal consistencies of the
streamlined instrument’s five scales: alpha reliabilities
are Transmission .81, Apprenticeship .88, Developmental .85,
Nurturance .92, Social Reform .82 and the overall internal
consistency is .80. More importantly, it shows that when teachers
examine their profiles, they recognize themselves with comments
like "Oh yeah, that’s me," and that colleagues
recognize each other’s orientations to teaching as represented
in the profiles yielded by the TPI.
When teachers’ perspectives scores are correlated with
their endorsements of short descriptors (one sentence or one
paragraph) of the five perspectives, there are moderate, significant
correlations between their scale scores and sentences or paragraphs—in
other words, teachers’ scores validate their self-descriptions.
Findings
Respondents’ individual scores can now be compared against
norms of large numbers of teachers of adults on profile sheets
tailored for the instrument. Mid-range scores are common for
Apprenticeship, Developmental and Nurturing, but lower scores
exist for Transmission and still lower for Social Reform.
Teachers who are newer in their careers indicate higher Nurturing
scores; professionals with greater fractions of their job
duties devoted to teaching show higher Developmental and Nurturing
scores; while those whose learners are comparatively older
show somewhat lower Nurturing scores. None of the scales show
gender biases (Collins, 1998).
In total, more than 1200 respondents have contributed to
establishing baseline norms and an additional 800 post-baccalaureate
students in teacher education programs are at the beginning
stages of a four-year longitudinal study to determine the
impact on their teaching perspective profiles during their
one-year educational preparation, and internship, and their
subsequent entry into teaching practice (Pratt, Collins and
Jarvis, 1999).
Implications
Over the past five years there has been a resurgence of interest
in teaching in adult and higher education. In adult education
this can be seen in the increased presence of papers on teaching
within the proceedings of CASAE, AERC, and SCUTREA. Within
higher education this resurgence is evident in the emergence
of centres for faculty development and teaching at colleges
and universities around the world. Once again, teaching has
gained a place of honor in adult and higher education.
At the same time, there is a call for teachers of adults
to be critically reflective in their practice of teaching.
For several years now professions have pushed for their members
to reflect critically on the underlying assumptions and values
that give direction and justification to their work. Yet for
many, this is not an easy task. What is it one should reflect
upon? How are the underlying values and assumptions to be
identified? In other words, the objects of critical reflection
are not self-evident. Indeed, it is something of a twist to
look not at the world, but at the very lens through which
we view the world.
The TPI gives direction to the process of critical reflection
by providing a baseline of information as well as articulating
teachers’ own beliefs about learning, knowledge, and
the social role of "teacher." Initial work with
the groups mentioned above suggests that the TPI provides
a means of tracking and looking more deeply at the underlying
values and assumptions that constitute teachers’ perspectives
on teaching. The Teaching Perspectives Inventory also
provides a well articulated basis from which to justify and
defend approaches to teaching when under review or evaluation.
[1100 words]
back to top
top
|
|
 |
|
 }
|
