The Change of Preservice Physical Education Teacher’s Value Orientations across the Course of Student Teaching

Abstract

There is limited empirical evidence of what value orientations preservice physical education teachers (PTs) endorse and how student teaching experiences influence their value orientations. The purpose of this study was to describe the initial value orientations of PTs at entry into the course of student teaching, and examine how their value orientations are changed across the student teaching semester. 14 Participants enrolled in the final student teaching semester were asked to complete the VOI-SF across the three terms of the student teaching semester (beginning, middle, and end of the semester). Descriptive analysis was conducted to identify PTs’ priorities for value orientations across the three terms. Furthermore, a Kruskal Wallis H test was conducted to see if there were any statistically significant changes in PTs’ value orientation priorities across the three terms. The results indicated that 1) PTs endorsed Disciplinary Mastery (DM) and Learning Process (LP) value orientations at entry into the course of student teaching and maintained the DM and LP as higher priorities across the three terms, and 2) their priority for the Social Responsibility (SR) value orientation remained the lowest but significantly increased among the three terms. Implications of this study for physical education teacher education include recognizing the strong DM and LP value orientation of PTs developed throughout teacher education curricula, and identifying the role of late field experiences like student teaching influencing PTs’ development of the SR value orientation.