How did the meanings constructed by Taiwanese pre-service teachers from educational news media affect their beliefs?

Abstract

The study investigates how Taiwanese pre-service teachers make meaning after reading positive or negative news coverage of educational events and how they construct meaning impact their pedagogical beliefs. An experiment with a two-group pre-test–post-test design, consisting of a positive and negative news group, is conducted. Multimedia news stories of seven educational events were selected and evaluated as positive or negative materials. In total, 215 pre-service teachers were assigned randomly to one of the two groups. Analytical results reveal that pre-service teachers who read positive news preferred inference to construct meaning. Their pedagogical beliefs did not differ when they used interpretation or inference. For negative news, pre-service teachers preferred interpretation; however, belief scores using interpretation were lower than those using inference. Specifically, meanings constructed using interpretation when reading negative news about school administrative engagement severely weakens their pedagogical beliefs. Pre-service teachers should be given sufficient material and training to rationally deal with a wide range of news stories, especially negative educational news stories.