2020 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Using ePortfolios to Investigate the Long-term Impacts of Language Teacher Education Programs
Project/Area Number |
20K02845
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Research Institution | Iwate University |
Principal Investigator |
Hall James 岩手大学, 教育学部, 准教授 (80361038)
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Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
小川 春美 岩手大学, 教育学部, 准教授 (30598561)
宮川 洋一 岩手大学, 教育学部, 教授 (70552610)
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Project Period (FY) |
2020-04-01 – 2023-03-31
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Keywords | Reflective Practice / ePortfolio / Praxis / WordPress / teacher education / teacher development |
Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
For FY 2020, we had the following goals: (1) Extract novice teacher principles and practices from the FY 2017 to FY 2019 ePortfolios and use them to (a) develop a reflective practice rubric to encourage student-teachers to develop their praxis, or theory informed practice (b) use the results to improve the design of the ePortfolio. (2) Track how graduates' teaching principles changed from their pre-service to in-service period. We were able to analyze the teaching principles of student-teachers and found that their principles overwhelmingly covered practical ideas and techniques such as how to create a lesson plan, interact with students. This was written about in Hall et. al (2020). However, tentative results indicate that as pre-service teachers develop, their principles begin to cover student-learning and instruction to benefit the students (see JALT 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRrhW3UgJ-w&t=4s). We were also able to use the analysis of principles to make it easier for students to attach thematic tags to their ePortfolio posts . In this way, students can link their experience with class themes at the university and the posts of their peers. We also wrote a paper about how the content-management system, WordPress, can be customized for post tagging (Hall et al, 2020).COVID-19 prevented us from conducting field work at the schools of in-service teachers, but the lead investigator published a paper on conducting reflective practice with in-service teachers (Hall, 2020).
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Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
3: Progress in research has been slightly delayed.
Reason
We have not been able to do any field work which is an essential part of conducting longitudinal research on the development of teachers from their pre-service to in-service stages. This has delayed the completion of the research by one year. Having said that, we have been able to focus more of our attention on improving the ePortfolio system and in that respect are ahead of schedule.
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Strategy for Future Research Activity |
While we have been unable to conduct field work, we have been able to contact over 70 graduates of the English Department and 50 have agreed to participate in the field work. As we have also finished coding the ePortfolios of all graduates, we are ready to conduct fieldwork whenever it is safe and are confident that we will eventually be able to get the results we originally sought.
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Causes of Carryover |
COVID-19 made it impossible for us to use the travel expenses, and this has extended the original research plan by one year.
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