The purpose of this study was to identify the actual conditions of in-service education for special school teachers and the level of their demands to find effective solutions for their in-service education.
To accomplish this purpose, questionnaire s...
The purpose of this study was to identify the actual conditions of in-service education for special school teachers and the level of their demands to find effective solutions for their in-service education.
To accomplish this purpose, questionnaire surveys were carried out for teachers of public and private special schools located in South Gyongsang, Pusan, North Gyongsang and Daegu. The questionnaire framework was discussed with my advising professor by reference to precedent theses and it consisted of 26 questions in total with two top sections and seven bottom sections. The collected data were classified by establishment, gender, level and length of career to calculate frequency and percentage for each question and then analyze the tendency of the whole and between groups. ?撮?-test was conducted to analyze the extent of significance between groups, and F-test was used for those questions measured by a five-point Likert type scale. For data process, SPSS/PC program was employed.
The results were summed up as follows.
First, for the actual conditions of in-service educatoin, though most teachers replied positively that the professional development motivated their participation, it was found that the extent of their activities was not strong and they were mostly unsatisfied as a whole. In particular, they answered that they had even more dissatisfaction at training opportunities, assessment instrument, training support and physical environment.
Second, their demand level for job training was far from the current inservice education terms of several items, and the details of their demands were different depending on their length of career.
The items with the largest gap between the actual conditions and the demands were training type, assessment instrument, object selection standard, training methods, in which the teachers wanted to be assessed only by process evaluation, without distance training system and paper and pencil test. In case of selecting objects the majority of them wanted volunteers to be selected. For training methods, more than half of the teachers replied that they most preferred experimental practice and experiential learning, which were followed by debates, discussions, lectures and demonstrations. In particular, male teachers wanted experimental practice and experiential learning more than females.
The most popular training contents were Maintenance of Education Process and Teaching Method, Use of Special Tools and Media, Guidance and Counseling and Skills for the Mentally Challenged, which were approximate to one another in popularity.
In reference with training improvement and incentive system sector, teaching methods and staff needed to be improved most urgently. For the top priority to incentive system, over half of the teachers answered that "a systematic and characteristic training with high quality" should be offered. The next priorities were performance payment after certain job training, introduction of free training and paid vacation, and reflection of transfer additional point rating according to regular accumulation of point after training.
To gain a satisfactory result from training, opinions of teachers in-service should be collected and reflected through discussions on the effectiveness as well as the possibility to apply them to real conditions.
Based on the results, suggestions for succeeding studies were that in order to activate inservice education for special school teachers, training courses should be set up through collecting the opinions in general of the teachers who are the objects of training. In addition, training courses need to be set up by length of career because training contents, methods and types they want are different depending on career. In addition, according to a rapid change in integration of special education, there should be more studies to identify the actual conditions of special education job training for teachers at integrated schools, as well as their demands.