Development and Validation of Pre-service Teachers' Personal Epistemologies of Teaching Scale (PT-PETS)

Yu, Ji Hyun. Ph.D., Purdue University, December 2013. Development and Validation of Pre-service Teachers’ Personal Epistemologies of Teaching Scale (PT-PETS). Major Professor: Peggy Ertmer. The Internet has changed not only how we conceptualize knowledge, but also how we learn in classroom. Knowledge is not any longer transmitted from experts to nonexperts, but is constructed through communication, collaboration, and integration among a network of people. In this context, teachers are expected to facilitate student-centered learning by helping students to construct knowledge through higher-order thinking rather than reproduce a series of facts. Although a growing body of research suggests that teachers’ beliefs about the nature of knowledge and the process of knowing, that is personal epistemology, are related to their teaching and their students’ learning, little work has done to examine its role of teachers’ personal epistemologies in preparing future generations of teachers. The purpose of this study was to develop and validate an instrument designed to assess pre-service teachers’ personal epistemologies of teaching (PT-PETS). The PTPETS was administered to two samples of pre-service teachers. Factor analysis of the results revealed a multidimensional construct composed of three factors: Construction of Teaching Knowledge, Contextuality of Teaching Knowledge, and Complexity of Teaching Knowledge. The Construction of Teaching Knowledge consists of 9 items (i.e.,