Pre-service science teachers’ opinions about using the feedback process in the preparation of teaching materials

This research was designed as a case study, a qualitative research design. The most fundamental quality of case studies is the comprehensive examination of a case or multiple cases (Yıldırım and Şimşek, 2008). Moreover, Büyüköztürk et al. (2012) claimed that a case study is a research that describes the essential elements of a certain entity based on place and time. Johnson and Christensen( 2012) defined case study research simply as research that provides a detailed account and analysis of one or more cases. The case investigated in this research is using the feedback process in the preparation of teaching materials. According to Johnson and Christensen( 2012); a case not only is an object or entity with a clear identity (e.g., a group, a person, a classroom, or an organization) but can also include an event (e.g., campus protest), an activity (e.g. learning the play softball) or a process (e.g., becoming a professional teacher during one’s first year of teaching).

Study Sample:
This study was conducted with 46 pre-service science teachers who were juniors in the education faculty of a public university in the west of Turkey’s Black Sea Region in the 2015-2016 academic year. The pre-service teachers were between the ages of 20 and 22. Of them, 32 were females and 14 were males. They were in their third year and took the course of Instructional Technologies and Material Design.

Operations:
This study was conducted in the Instructional Technologies and Materials Design course, which is taught in the first semester of the junior year in the science teaching program. The course requires the pre-service teachers to prepare six two-dimensional teaching materials (pencil and paper) in pairs every week for a science subject of their choice. These teaching materials are worksheets, structured grids, diagnostic trees, concept maps, concept networks and meaning analysis tables. The researcher created rubrics for grading each kind of teaching material considering the criteria for the qualities of the material after consulting expert opinion. These rubrics were distributed to the pre-service teachers before preparing the teaching materials to guide their efforts. Afterwards, the teaching materials created by the pre-service teachers were evaluated by the researcher once each week. During the evaluation process, the participants were given feedback about their work in written form and in face-to-face conversations, which was suitable for the teaching material preparation principles and the qualities of the teaching materials. When providing feedback, the researcher stuck to the rubrics and scored the teaching materials first. The pre-service teachers received verbal and written feedback, and saw their initial grades and were given one week to revise and improve their teaching materials based on feedback. At the end of the week, the pre-service teachers resubmitted their teaching materials. The researcher reevaluated them and gave them final grades. This process continued for six weeks.

Data Collection Tools:
In this study, the data were collected using an opinion form including open-ended questions as well as the interviews held with the pre-service teachers. The opinion form was created by the researcher in consistency with the research problems with the purpose of receiving pre-service teachers’ opinions about the use of feedback. The content validity of the form was confirmed by the experts, and it was administered to all pre-service teachers in 45 minutes at the end of the implementation process. The other data collection tool of the study was a collection of questions that were asked to 10 students (7 females and 3 males) in the study sample during the interviews. The interview questions were prepared in context of the research problems, and were asked to some of the pre-service teachers during the interviews. These are comprehensive questions to make an in-depth analysis of the research problems. Some of these questions, for which expert opinions were received, are as follows:

Question 1: What do you think about the feedback being advantageous in objective assessment?
Question 2: What do you think about the effects of feedback on student-teacher communication?

Data Analysis:
All questions were analyzed using content and descriptive analysis methods. The written answers of the pre-service teachers to the open-ended questionnaire were analyzed using the content analysis method, which mainly aims to find concepts and relationships to explain the data (Yıldırım and Şimşek, 2008). Categories were determined first according to the open-ended questions in the questionnaire, which are feedback’s contribution to learning, advantages, disadvantages, and preferring it in professional life. Every participant has more than one opinions on each category. These opinions were analyzed using content analysis method to determine keywords. Frequency values were found according to the repetition frequency of these opinions of the pre-service teachers. Keywords are the significant parts (a word, sentence, paragraph etc.) included in the data and form the basic analysis unit in content analysis (Yıldırım and Şimşek, 2008). In some cases, phrases were used to specify the context in which these words are used, and the frequency values were put in an order from the highest to the lowest. The data were analyzed using two different raters. Their Miles-Huberman reliability value (Miles and Huberman, 1994) was calculated as 85.18. The data obtained from the interviews conducted with 10 pre-service teachers were analyzed using the descriptive analysis, which aims to submit the opinions of the interviewed or observed individuals to readers through direct quotations to conspicuously reflect them (Yıldırım and Şimşek, 2008). The findings were obtained through direct quotations from the data obtained from the interviews. The pre-service teachers’ name were coded such as the “Pre-Service Teacher 1 (PST1-).