Professional Continuity: Investigating the Alignment of Technology Teachers’ Internal Capability Constructs

• In contemporary education, teachers’ epistemological beliefs governing what and how to teach are important due to their influence on practice, pedagogy, assessment, and the learner. Teachers’ beliefs are perhaps of more significance in technology education as defining clear subject boundaries regarding ‘what to teach’ has traditionally proven difficult. Despite this, there are recognisable practices, processes and outputs that are considered of value to the learner. This research sets out to explore the level of professional continuity among educators regarding such outputs in technology education.Initial data collection involved the generation of authentic evidence in response to an open design task. Participants were sought from five schools across Ireland. The cohort consisted of first- and second-year technology education pupils (n=64) in post-primary education. Following this, technology teachers (n=27) were engaged in the holistic assessment of pupil work utilising the Adaptive Comparative Judgment (ACJ) method. The ACJ method relies on a series of binary judgments between two pieces of evidence, effectively producing a rank order of evidence.In alignment with previous studies utilising the ACJ method, teachers generated very high levels of reliability when tasked with the adjudication of pupil work, despite the lack of assessment criteria. This suggests an implicit understanding of capability among teachers, irrespective of variables such as culture, context or curricula. Interestingly however, not all teachers engaged in judgements agreed consensually. Taking cognisance of this, an analysis of constructs of capability highlighted five criteria that governed teachers’ adjudication on portfolios. The significance of these criteria and the continuity between teachers’ constructs of capability is discussed.  

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Technology Education

Construct of Capability

Professional Continuity

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)