R. R. ROBICHAUX, A. J. GUARINO
content and the activities used to teach that content (McFarland,
1998). Additionally, as pre-service teachers gain experience,
classroom management issues become less of a concern and
curriculum, lesson content and context, and pedagogy become
more significant when reflecting on their teaching (Lee, 1999).
In general, “reflection continually emerges as a suggested way
of helping practitioners better understand what they know and
do as they develop their knowledge of practice through recon-
sidering what they learn in practice” (Lougran, 2002).
Although several studies have examined reflection and re-
flective teaching in teacher education, the overwhelming ma-
jority of these studies have been qualitative in design, focusing
on a small number of cases. Furthermore, the paucity of re-
search comparing the reflective practices of pre-service teach-
ers being assessed through an undergraduate professional port-
folio with those who were not assessed in this manner makes
this study relevant for those universities implementing or cur-
rently employing portfolio assessment.
Method
Sample
Participants were 510 pre-service teachers, who had com-
pleted 180 hour of actual teaching and a minimum of 270 hours
of observations, conferencing, and participation in other teacher
duties such as grading, writing assessments, and researching
future lesson topics, during their student teaching semester. Of
the 510 participants, 232 completed their student teaching dur-
ing the first year of this study prior to the implementation of a
portfolio assessment system. Thus, these participants were not
required to submit an exit portfolio at the conclusion of their
degree programs. The remaining 278 participants completed
their student teaching experience during the second year of this
study and were required to submit a professional portfolio as a
requirement for graduation.
All participants successfully completed the student teaching
semester and thus, completed the degree requirements for their
major in education. Eighty seven percent were female while
13% were male. Slightly over 90% labeled themselves as Cau-
casian with the remaining 10% classified themselves as either
African American, Asian or “Other”.
Procedure
Over the course of four consecutive semesters, participants in
this study completed The Student Teaching Reflection Survey
(STRS) (Robichaux, 2001) on the last day of their student tea-
ching experience.
Instrumentation
Adopting Costa and Kallick’s (2000) theoretical framework,
the first author devised a three-domain instrument, The Student
Teaching Reflection Survey (STRS) (Robichaux, 2001). STRS is
a twelve-item questionnaire assessing three goals of reflection:
Improvement, Performance, and Professionalism, scored on a
4-point Likert-type scale.
According to Costa and Kallick, the mental processes that
one uses when reflecting include “comparing the results that
were anticipated and intended with the results that were
achieved, acting on and processing the information by analyz-
ing, synthesizing, and evaluating, and applying learning to con-
texts beyond the one in which it was learned and making com-
mitments to plans of action.” Thus in the STRS, Improvement
was operationalized as whether or not the student teacher com-
pared the outcomes of the lesson taught to what was expected.
Items in the Performance domain in the STRS assessed whether
or not the student teacher analyzed, synthesized and evaluated
specific aspects of the lesson. The final domain, Professional-
ism, evaluated the student teacher’s use of reflection as a tool
for professional growth.
Results
A 2 × 3 mixed ANOVA was conducted for this study. The
between variable was group (non-portfolio, portfolio) while the
within variable was the three goals of reflection (performance,
professionalism, and improvement). Results indicated a statis-
tically significant interaction effect, Wilks’ Lambda = .639, F
(2, 507) = 143.39, p = .00 1, eta- squared = .027 .
A series of independent samples t-tests were conducted as
follow-up to the interaction effect to assess differences between
the two groups on: 1) Improvement; 2) Performance; and 3)
Professionalism. Results indicated differences on Professional-
ism. Because the equal variance assumption was violated as
indicated by a significant Levene’s test, a Behrens-Fisher cor-
rection was calculated. The portfolio group scored statistically
significantly greater than the non-portfolio group, F (403.55) =
3.96, p < .001. See Table 1 for means and standard deviations.
Follow-up repeated measures analysis indicated that that for
non-portfolio group, only Improvement was significantly grea-
ter than Professionalism or Performance. There was no signifi-
cant difference between Professionalism and Performance. See
Table 2 for means and standard deviations.
A second follow-up repeated measures analysis indicated
that for the portfolio group, Improvement was significantly
greater than Professionalism and Performance. Professionalism
was significantly greater than Performance. See Table 3 for
means and standard deviations.
Discussion
The purpose of this investigation was to examine the nature
of the content of pre-service teachers’ daily teaching reflections.
In general, the content of most of the participants’ reflections
Table 1.
Group differences on professionalism.
Portfolio Non-portfolio
M SD M SD
3.53 .51 3.3 .72
Table 2.
Non-portfolio group scores.
Variable M SD
Performance 3.21 .59
Professionalism 3.31 .72
Improvement 3.60 .46
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