| Teacher reflection: The Impact of Demographic Characteristics |
| Paper ID : 1021-CNF-FULL |
| Authors |
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Ahmadreza Eghtesadi Roudi * ELT Department, Shahid Beheshti Campus of Mashhad, Farhangian University |
| Abstract |
| Teacher reflection is one of the important characteristics of teachers which has been found to improve aspects of teacher’s job such as teachers’ awareness and understanding, decision-making, and to enhance students’ critical thinking. Noticing the importance of reflection, this study examined the role of demographic characteristics of gender, academic degree, experience, and teaching context in teacher reflection of 265 male and female English teachers who taught either at public high schools or in private language institutions. The English Language Teacher Reflective Inventory, which measures five elements of reflection, along with a demographic questionnaire was administered to the participants. Taking the normality and non-normality of different sets of data, the collected data were analyzed using the appropriate statistical tests such as t-test, Mann-Whitney, Kruskal-Wallis, and ANOVA. The results showed that context and academic degree were the only significant factors. Teachers in institutions had higher levels of practical reflection than public school teachers. The follow-up tests for the academic degrees also showed that teachers with non-ELT degrees also had significantly higher levels of practical reflection, and those with MA degrees in ELT showed significantly higher levels of critical and cognitive reflection. The results indicate that in-service training courses should focus on training teachers for reflective practice in schools especially for teachers with lower degrees. Moreover, due to the importance of reflective practice, Farhangian University, where prospective teachers are educated needs to pay special attention to prepare reflective teachers. |
| Keywords |
| Reflection, Gender, Experience, Context, Academic degree |
| Status: Accepted |