Publication details
Teacher´s Power Basis Perception of Czech Lower Secondary Students
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | The ability of a person or a group to influence opinions, values, and behaviour of others is one of the most studied phenomena in social sciences. The importance of this phenomenon for educational and instructional settings is obvious: The latest research shows that the realisation of instructional aims is enabled by clearly established power relationships in classes. Power negotiation and use of power is understood as an inherent part of educational process. The most influential, traditional typology of power as a relational phenomenon comes from French and Raven (1960). They distinguish teacher's power in relation to a (by students perceived) principle on which it is based on, i.e. coercive, reward, legitimate, referent, and expert power. In accordance to this we adapted one of the latest and most used instruments measuring relational power of teachers – Teacher Power Use Scale (Schrodt, Witt, and Turman, 2007). This regarded the adaptation for younger students (i. e. not university but lower secondary level) and to the Czech sociocultural conditions. The convenient research sample consisted of 2188 students from 117 classes (7th grade 39 %, 8th grade 48 %, 9th grade 13 %). Data were collected in the course of four school subjects, i. e. Civics (23 %), History (22 %), Czech Literature (23 %) and Geography (18 %). After CFA and item analysis we are conducting descriptive statistics and hypothesis testing. The 3 main research question areas are: a) Does Czech data support the Anglo-Saxon model of relational power with five main power bases? b) Which power bases are the most and the least used (seen from the perspective of students) by Czech lower secondary teachers? Are the results similar to international findings? c) Are there significant differences in perceived power bases use based on different variables (like different teachers/classes, teacher's length of practice, different school subjects, students' gender, students' age, and students' achievement)? |
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