Teaching Research and Inquiry in Undergraduate Teacher‐education Programmes

Abstract

Abstract Teacher training institutions continue to evaluate their pre‐service programs to ensure that subject offerings and approaches produce the desired characteristics of quality in graduating teachers. A recent trend in the research and policy literature has been the call for the development of the teacher as a reflective practitioner with a concomitant demand that teachers undertake research and inquiry in their classrooms. This paper reports on a case study at a university in New South Wales, Australia in which students and staff were surveyed regarding their understandings of the research process. The survey indicated that staff included only minor coverage of the research process in their existing subjects which was in accord with student perceptions that they had little knowledge of the processes. Students overwhelmingly supported the inclusion of a compulsory subject in research methods in the third year of their teacher education program. Further, students indicated a strong belief that the study of reasearch methods would benefit them in their roles as reflective practioners.