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The Relationship of Authoritarianism to the Behavior of Pre-Service Science Teachers

The problem of this study was to investigate the relationship between the degree of authoritarianism expressed by pre-service secondary science teachers and the ways in which they spent their instructional time. This study was conducted on all students enrolled in the secondary science instructional methods course at a large North Texas area university for the fall semester of 1972 and the spring semester of 1973. The total population for the study was 55 students. To aid in resolution of the problem three purposes were formulated. The first purpose was to determine whether authoritarianism expressed by prospective science teachers was related to the ways they spent their instructional time. The second purpose was to determine if the authoritarianism expressed by prospective science teachers was related to their use of an indirect teaching style. The third purpose was to provide feedback to the prospective science teachers on the ways they spent their instructional time. It was concluded that teachers who were very authoritarian asked fewer questions and a different type of question than someone of lesser authoritarianism. The authoritarian asked questions that could be answered with a short answer such as yes or no, while the lesser authoritarian asked questions that allow the student to have more freedom in his response. Further studies of this type should focus on the teaching of questioning techniques to extreme authoritarians to establish whether they might learn to use divergent questions to teach science indirectly.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:unt.edu/info:ark/67531/metadc501106
Date05 1900
CreatorsHeard, Virgil G.
ContributorsCowan, Paul J., Schlueter, Edgar A., Hardy, Clifford A., Marquis, Robert Lincoln, Jr.
PublisherNorth Texas State University
Source SetsUniversity of North Texas
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis or Dissertation
Formatv, 80 leaves, Text
RightsPublic, Heard, Virgil G., Copyright, Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved.

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