Testing the research abilities of student teachers at pre-service training and education

Abstract

Some academic supervisors claimed the low abilities of pre-service students on conducting a research. This research aims to measure the Research Abilities (RA) of students by developing the instruments to test the knowledge of students on essential components of research, i.e., understandings on the type of research, research design, research problem, hypothesis, variable, type of data, research method, sampling, and data analysis. The instrument is an essay, and multiple-choice test consists of 30 questions divided into four categories, i.e., Research Problems, Hypothesis, and Variables (Q1); Research Method (Q2); Data Analysis (Q3); and Action Research (Q4). About 36 science and non-science students participated voluntarily on the online test, 89% are females, and 14% are science education students. Only 35 data are valid to be analyzed. The result shows that the highest score belongs to a non-science student (24), and the average rating of science students (12.14) is almost equal with non-science ones (12.62). The average score of Q1 is 5.1 of 12, Q2 4.4 of 8, Q3 is 1.1 of 3, and Q4 is 0.9 of 3. The conclusion is students show low performances on RA's components.