Characteristics of Good Science Teachers and Preservice Teacher Education Curriculum Percevied by Secondary Teachers

현직 교사들이 바라는 중등과학교사의 특성과 사전교사교육과정

Quality control of science teachers seems to be one of the most important tasks to improve the quality of science education in Korea. The purposes of this study, as a survey, were to identify characteristics of good science teachers and to make an outline of preservice teacher education curriculum for cultivating the characteristics from inserivce secondary science teachers. A questionnaire was developed for this study and distributed to 176 inservice teachers. It had three parts: 1) characteristics of good science teachers, 2) weights of preservice curriclum areas, and 3) weights of college courses. The means and standard deviations of teachers' responses were calculated. To test the differences between teacher variables, t-tests were executed. The inservice teachers perceived that the junior-high school teacher's characteristics should be different from the senior-high school teacher's. Characteristics, such as enthusiasm toward teaching or students, subject knowledge, content selection and organizing skill, teaching techniques, and scientific worldview were ranked within top five of good science teacher's chracteristics. The teachers' perception about preservice curriculum were as follows: 1) present weight of liberal arts area should be reduced: 2) weight of content area for junior-high school teachers should be different from that for senior-high school teachers: 3) present weight of pedagogy area should be increased: 4) present weight of science education area should be increased: and 5) many courses in pedagogy and sciencd education areas need to be changed, Based on the data and disussion, a conceptual model for preservice teacher education curriculum was proposed.