The impact of online training in reflective teaching and classroom observation on pre-service teachers' self-efficacy, pedagogical content knowledge and practicum practice: A quasi-experimental study

Building capacities with pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) as reflections of teachers' understanding and transformations of the content knowledge is crucial for the development of teachers' self-efficacy as a measure of teaching confidence and expected to be positively associated with the levels of PCK. Some research has been studied peer dialogues in a virtual learning environment of pre-service teachers on practical issues in teaching reflected different depths of influences of teacher education and practicum. However, little empirical research demonstrated the effects of training on reflective teaching and classroom observation on pre-service teachers' self-efficacy, PCK, and teaching performance. This study adopted a quasi-experimental research design with mixed methods to examine the effects of online training. A sample of 97 pre-service teachers in a teacher education university in northern China was recruited and randomly assigned to experimental conditions with varied training sequence or no training as the control. The tests administered to assess PCK did not show any results favoring the groups with online training. The survey results showed that pre-service teachers' self-efficacy significantly increased after the online training, regardless of conditions. The text mining results of pre-service teachers' reflection logs indicated significantly more matching keywords in the experimental group, suggesting more profound thoughts. The analysis of classroom observation is still in progress, but pre-service teachers indicated that they got benefit from the online training in post-practicum interviews. The future research could extend the length of online training for pre-service teachers to have sufficient time to develop PCK. Copyright © 2020 International Conference on Learning and Teaching.