The Effects of the Educational Training Courses on the Doctoral Students' Conceptions of Effective Teaching.

Ünver, Gülsen

The education of the instructors for teaching is carried out through some postgraduate courses or seminars. This study aims to find out the changes in doctoral students' conception of effective teaching through the two edu-cational courses (Development and Learning, and Instructional Planning and Evaluation) taught in Turkey. Seventy-one doctoral students described a class in which effective teaching is conducted before and after taking these educational courses. The classical content analysis was administered on the data. The doctoral students' conceptions of the effective teaching were cat-egorized within instructor-centred and learner-centred conceptions. The analysis revealed that the conceptions of the effective teaching of more than a half of the doctoral students were not changed by the training about teaching. What the analysis also revealed, however, was that the changes in their conceptions from instructor-centred category to learner-centred cat-egory were higher than those from learner-centred category to instructor-centred category. In conclusion, these courses were not influential suffi-ciently for the doctoral students in improving learner-centred conceptions of the effective teaching. These conclusions might be attributed to the inconsistency in the national, institutional, and individual objectives. Time dedicated to studying these courses is thought to be short for learning the intensive contents of the courses determined by a central institution. The low attitudes of doctoral students also might have affected their thinking about the conception of the effective teaching. Following the evaluation of the data, some proposals are recommended for doctoral students to con-ceptualize the effective teaching within the learner-centred way.

CURRICULUM; DOCTORAL students; TEACHING methods; EFFECTIVE teaching; CONTENT analysis; SEMINARS

Journal of Higher Education / Yüksekögretim Dergisi, 2013, Vol 3, Issue 2, p82

2146-796X

Academic Journal

10.2399/yod.13.011