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Open Access Thesis

Keywords

Student teaching;

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the concept meanings of senior women students of the State College of Iowa who had completed the student teaching requirement of the Professional Sequence for the Bachelor of Arts Degree--Teaching Program. An attempt was made to ascertain the similarities and differences in the meanings of the concepts held by the students, and to assess the extent to which they had identified with the role of teaching. The subjects consisted of three groups of senior women students, with no teaching experience other than a nine weeks' period of full-time student teaching completed during the first half of the spring semester, 1966. Group 1 comprised thirty-two senior women students preparing to teach in the lower elementary school; Group 2, sixteen senior women student preparing to teach in the upper elementary school, and Group 3, thirty-eight senior women students preparing to teach in the secondary school. The Semantic Differential, a technique for measuring the psychological meaning of concepts, was administered to the subjects during class time in the course 21:118, the Social Foundations of Education. Ten concepts: myself, my ideal self, teacher, marriage, working with children, professional improvement, books, grading examinations, lesson plans, and parent conferences were rated on a seven-step Differential of fifteen bipolar adjectives or scales, measuring three factors of semantic space, evaluative, potency, and activity. Factorial structures and the semantic space of the three groups of students were examined to ascertain similarities and differences of concept meanings. A measure of the relationship of self-concept to vocational choice was obtained by comparing the meanings of myself and my ideal self with those of teacher and working with children. Students appeared to look at teaching in much the same way, for factorial structures were similar. All concepts were evaluated highly by all groups, but differences appeared on the potency and activity factors. Figures of the three-dimensional space were constructed and were inspected for the patterns of clustering of the concepts. All the concepts of all the groups clustered along the evaluative dimension and were some distance from meaninglessness. Evidence of the pattern of similarity observed in the figures was provided by the Pearson product-moment coefficients of correlation which were computed over the three D matrices.· Differences between groups in the meaning of the same concept were calculated and were tested for significance using the Median Test. Differences in meanings of eight out of thirty concepts were found to be significant. Differences between meanings within a group were obtained by inspecting the figures of semantic space and the 0 1s between concepts in the matrices. Inspection revealed that four concepts clustered closely together: my ideal self, teacher, marriage, and working with children, and apparently were regarded as closely related by all the groups of students. Results indicated that the three groups held similar meanings of the concepts, with some slight differences, that the concept meanings were highly valued, but rated not so strong or active, and that the role of teacher was related to the self-concept of the students.

Year of Submission

1966

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Education

Department

Department of Education and Psychology

First Advisor

William Elster

Second Advisor

Cecil K. Phillips

Third Advisor

Harley E. Erickson

Date Original

1966

Object Description

1 PDF file (125 leaves)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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