Consonance and dissonance between Turkish prospective teachers' values and practices: Conceptions about teaching, learning, and assessment

Abstract

This study aimed to examine the consonance and dissonance between prospective teachers' values and practices in terms of their conceptions about teaching/learning and conceptions about assessment, as well as to explore the patterns of those consonance and dissonance between prospective teachers' values and practices. The sample consisted of 304 prospective teachers majoring in teaching science, art, special education, music, Turkish literacy, mathematics, English language, and classroom teaching domains in a large university located in the north-west of the Black Sea region in Turkey. Overall results of the study showed that the prospective teachers valued constructivist teaching/learning, making learning explicit, and promoting learning autonomy more than they practised, whereas they practised traditional teaching and performance orientation more than they valued. Results also revealed that the prospective teachers believed that constructivist teaching/learning, traditional teaching/learning, making learning explicit, promoting learning autonomy, and performance orientation were both valuable and applicable. These results also provided evidence that there were both consonance and dissonance between prospective teachers' conceptions about teaching/learning and conceptions about assessment.