Reflection has a crucial role in learning to teach as a long developmental process. This case study focuses on the engagement of a teacher of English as a foreign language (EFL) in reflection. The teacher was engaged in a 12-week reflection process which included two-phase procedures repeated five times. The first phase of each procedure involved reflection on lexical problems through journals and peer discussions. The second was for reflection on classroom practice through journals and interviews. With a sequential exploratory mixed methods design, the study involved analysis of the teacher's reflections first qualitatively and then quantitatively. The qualitative analysis was based on the taxonomies for descriptive and critical reflection presented in Ho and Richards (1993) and Farrell (1999). The quantitative side involved one-way goodness-offit chi-square test results. The results revealed that she referred to most of the topics in the taxonomy, and the top three were students' problems, an approach/procedure, and positive evaluations of lessons. Overall, her critical reflection outnumbered her descriptive reflection, and was mostly related to evaluating teaching. The teacher also displayed development in the sense of critical reflectivity. All the quantitative analyses had statistically significant results. Globally, her reflection in journals, discussions, and interviews enabled her to respond to the context, engage in conscious deliberation, and integrate knowledge into the teaching act. In this way, the study is expected to contribute to the participant's professional development.
The aim of this study is to examine the multiple choice final exams administered to the 210 non-compulsory preparatory school students. The study aims to analyze the exams in terms of three characteristics: item facility, item discrimination and distractor efficiency. The study had quantitative research design and the data were analyzed through Paired Samples T-Test and frequency analysis. The results of the study revealed that most items in final exams had moderate difficulty levels for the students. However, almost all items in the exams had low discrimination indices and some items had negative discrimination values. Furthermore, the results show that one third of the items in the exams had at least one non-functional distractor. At the end of the study, some guidelines were presented for teachers and test developers to make the items more functional.
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