The Relation of Student Teachers' Classroom Behavior and Eriksonian Ego Identity

Abstract

Planning the curriculum for teacher training and selecting students for admission present a number of questions. Responsible persons are always looking for better answers to them. Admitting the &dquo;wrong&dquo; people, administering &dquo;useless&dquo; training, and having students &dquo;fail&dquo; in performance near the end of their programs, are all certainly costly and painful.The limitations of using cognitive information to help answer these questions have kept some investigators searching for personality information, even against mainstreams of current interest within educational psychology. Research involving prediction of achievement in learning, as well as actual practice in admission to school programs are generally based on cognitive variables such as IQ, grade point average, college board score, and Graduate Record Exam.This study investigated the usefulness of an Eriksonian construct of ego identity in accounting for the success or failure of student teachers. Erikson asserts that to consumate a firm positive ego identity during late adolescence (which normally involves reducing identity diffusion and resolving an acceptable psychosocial identity) is closely connected to ability to put together an occupational identity and relate well to others in work and personal interaction (Erikson, 1963). Several studies in the sixties attempted with some success to build a measure of ego identity based on Erikson's idea, and to correlate its scores with assessments of adjustment (Block, 1961;Rasmussen, 1964;Wessman and Ricks, 1966;Marcia, 1966).Regarding the assessment of student teacher success or failure, some research has shown that the verbal behavior of teachers is representative of overall teacher behavior, and that versions of interaction analysis have certain kinds of validity and reliability as means of recording and analyzing classroom teaching behavior. A line of research employing interaction analysis has indicated that teacher behavior defined as indirect, but specifically those indirect behaviors classified as &dquo;accepting learner ideas&dquo; are related to learner achievement and Shirley A. Walter is coordinator of education field experiences and professor of education, West Chester State College, West Chester, Pennsylvania. Eugene Stivers is associate professor of psychoeducational process at Temple University, Philadelphia. positive learner attitudes (Amidon and Flanders, 1961;Amidon and Simon, 1965;Flanders, Brode, and Morrison, 1968; Flanders, 1969). Recent research has shown , that this general relationship between indirect teacher behavior and student achievement may not apply to low socioeconomic status students (Rosenshine, 1976).Other research has suggested that the complexity of questions asked by a teacher may be directly related to learner achievement and attitudes (Gallagher and in this area, too, some recent research raises doubts about this relationship's application to teaching low socioeconomic status students (Rosenshine, 1976).The purpose of this study was to measure the r...