| Papers & Workshops |
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Assoc. Prof. Habibah Elias
and Assoc. Prof. Zaidatol Akmaliah
Lope Pihie
Faculty of Educational Studies, Universiti Putra Malaysia
The trend in our educational system today is moving from classroom
based learning towards virtual classrooms where children will
depend less on the teachers for knowledge of content and more
on multi-media resources. To meet that transition, teachers have
to concentrate on the pedagogical content knowledge as emphasized
by Schulman (1986). This is because even with the virtual classrooms,
teachers still need pedagogical content knowledge. However at
this juncture there is little information on the pedagogical
content knowledge among graduate teachers. Therefore there is
a need to conduct a study on this aspect. Since students are
the clients, they are an important source of information regarding
teachers' competence in terms of pedagogical content knowledge.
This paper reports a research findings conducted with the following
objectives:
To solicit
1) teaching strategies utilized by graduate teachers as perceived by their students.
2) the learning approaches utilized by graduate teachers for their lessons as perceived by the students
3) the students' understanding of the content knowledge
4) how graduate teachers handle learning problems as perceived by the students.
A survey was conducted on a cluster sample of 387 secondary
school students aged between 15 to 16 years. A structured questionnaire
based on Schulman model of pedagogical content knowledge was
administered to subjects. Results showed that the graduate teachers
used demonstrations and brainstorming as the main strategies
in teaching compared to the traditional methods. As far as learning
approaches are concerned the graduate teachers still used whole
classroom instruction with little individual guidance although
some conducted cooperative learning groups strategy. The graduate
teachers used revision, more detailed explanations, examples
and relating experiences to overcome learning problems. The findings
of this study showed that there is a trend away from the traditional
methods. The implications of the findings on the teacher education
and training for the new millennium will be discussed.
RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
5-9 July 2000