Abstract—Teacher training universities in Japan are required to develop pre-service teachers’ “practical teaching skills” such as skills and understanding for curriculum development. However, it is difficult to provide teachers a clear view of what the learning objectives are in performance tasks. Therefore, this study purposed to promote pre-service teachers’ skills and understanding of curriculum development by using a task-specific coaching rubric. Participants were 130 third-year university students who were taking pre-service teacher education courses for elementary and secondary education. Participants were assigned to a treatment group that was provided a rubric in advance of the learning activity and a control group. Participants were required to develop a curriculum and thinking tools with the aim of promoting children’s higher-order thinking skills. A task-specific rubric with seventeen criteria and four standard/rating levels was used to assess participants’ performance, and a ten-item quiz was used to assess participants understanding. Results of the study show that students who were provided a coaching rubric before undertaking the task scored significantly higher than the control group on both the performance task (
t (95) = 5.33,
p < .01) and quiz (
t (104) = 4.75,
p < .01). Results suggest that coaching rubrics provide pre-service teachers a view of what the learning target is, and they provide students thoughtful judges of the quality of their performance. Given the findings of the study, it is expected to validate and generalize task-specific coaching rubrics which enhance learners’ curriculum development skills for higher-order thinking.
Index Terms—Coaching rubrics, curriculum development, higher-order thinking skills, pre-service teacher education.
Hiroki Yoshida is with Tokoha University, Shizuoka, Japan (e-mail: h-yoshida@av-lab.org).
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Cite: Hiroki Yoshida, "Effects of Coaching Rubrics on Pre-service Teacher Education for Curriculum Development: With Focus on the Promotion of Higher-Order Thinking Skills," International Journal of Knowledge Engineering vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 165-171, 2015.
