The Knowledge Base for Interns' Teaching Decisions. Monograph No. 15.

A study of post degree elementary interns at the University of Saskatchewan (Canada) (N=25) was conducted to determine the main sources of information they employed in decision making related to teaching and relationships in the school. The study focused on: (1) the extent to which interns used the knowledge base gained from education classes in planning decisions for teaching and while teaching; and (2) what other sources of knowledge influenced their decision making. Data were collected by conducting a structured interview with students and doing a similar interview with cooperating teachers as a check on how much knowledge they had given the interns. The interns were asked to rate the education courses taken in terms of usable knowledge they had gained from the classes. Cooperating teachers and interns were questioned on initial perceptions of the internship prior to classroom work actually beginning. These data were collected to determine the correlation between the preconceived notions of internship and reality. Also, each intern was videotaped for two lessons, one in mathematics and one in language arts. The tapes were analyzed for certain teacher behaviors and correlations were determined between teaching scores, perceptions, and the origins of the knowledge base. (Author/LL)