Abstract
Teacher's ability to reflect on lessons is considered one of the main competences which has the potential to improve education. Teachers who are able to provide a constructive feedback to their colleagues' as well as their own lessons keep improving the system.
These teachers' competences are usually summarized under the term professional vision (Sherin, 2007) and contain two components: selective attention, and knowledge-based reasoning. The presented study is a part of a design-based research which has been aiming at an Observation Practice Course's (OPC) evidence-based improvement.
In this contribution, the last year of the courses online version is described. The aim was to evaluate this online course's effect on the student's professional vision and compare it with years when the students went to schools to observe the lessons.
The study used a pre-test post-test design. Pre-service chemistry teachers (N = 11) watched a video-segment of a chemistry lesson and reflected on it in a written form.
The reflections were later divided into information units (IUs) and analysed using the original tool by Sherin and Van Es (2009) completed with Shulman's (1986) PCK and the annotation-analysis-alteration method (Slavík et al., 2014). Students' statements in the IUs were categorized into following dimensions: actor, pedagogical-content and parsing strategy.
The difference between numbers of IUs between pre- and post-reflections was tested using Wilcoxon Single Rank Test with the r for the effect size. The results showed the students became more proficient in writing reflections - the overall number of IUs almost doubled.
Their selective attention increased significantly in their attention to teacher (p = .003, r = .632) as well as teacher in interaction with students (p = .007, r = .570). In their reflections, the students annotated (p = .004, r = .607) and also analysed (p = .049, r = .42) the lesson significantly more after the OPC.
Their attention was also significantly more focused on pedagogical dimension (p = .004, r = .632) together with pedagogical-content dimension (p = .005, r = .598). Especial the shifts in student-teacher interaction and pedagogical-content dimension suggest the students' improvement in observing lesson activities rather than following the content-driven lesson structure.
The only dimension of suggested lesson alterations remained unchanged showing potential limitations of the OPC. Also, more attention needs to be given to the students' content recognition as it seems they remain oblivious in this respect.
Therefore, it seems that, in spite of running online, the course had a positive effect on the students and can be considered a good start before them doing their first in-school practice.