Opinion survey concerning primary school tercher-traning curricula nad entrance examinations : A comparison of opinions among students, primary school teachers and university faculty concerning practical training subjects

A partial amendment of the Teachers License Act was made twice since 1980s. In the last amendment. subjects the Act requires to get in university were drastically changed. This change has a big problem especially on primary school teacher's license. However. no clear explanation of the purpose of the change or no objection against the change had arisen in discussions among researchers of pedagogue. Therefore. it is speculated that the opinions of the course teachers are different from that of the job site teachers. Then, the purpose of this study was to identify the differences among opinions of concerned groups, that is the job site groups and university teachers group. 156 first year students, 204 third year students. 108 primary school teachers (teachers) and 91 university teachers (professors) who belong to teacher-training course answered a questionnaire. The questionnaire has three dimensions. First is opinions about practical training subjects (arts and physical education). Second is opinions about how to distribute subjects in curriculum to train primary school teacher who must teach eight or nine subjects. The third is opinions about pedagogical principles in teacher college. Subjects were asked to answer each statement (yes or no) on the five-point scale except three items (four-point scale) concerning the third dimension. The same twenty one items were given to all the four groups. Statistical analysis revealed that the four groups were significantly different for ten out of the 21 items (four were 1% level, three were 5% level and three were 10% level). In most of these cases. mean scores of each group showed simply increase or simply decrease tendency from first year students to teachers. This would reflect the amount of understanding the primary school teacher's job. Professors' mean scores. however. did not show extrapolated value from the teachers' mean score (Fig 1.2). Factor analysis using eight items asking opinions about how arts and physical education should be also reveals that the professors had a quite different opinion from the other three groups. From this data a role of teacher college professors in educational revolution in Japan and its limitation were discussed