An analysis of classroom interaction patterns of Kenyan secondary school chemistry teachers and their undesirable behaviours.

Abstract

One major concern in education is the study of events which take place in the classroom. In particular, studies of classroom interaction patterns of different teachers have been conducted in an attempt to explain and interpret behaviour patterns of different teachers in the classroom. The present study is aimed at establishing a relationship between classroom interaction and undesirable behaviours of teachers. The study was conducted in two stages - a training stage followed by the main or final study. The main purpose of the training was to train the observer on how to observe~ and code reliably classroom interaction. During this stage a sample of four (4) chemistry teachers teaching in government secondary schools in both urban and rural Kenya were used for this training. The observer sat in classes of these four teachers with other two trained observers and coded their chemistry lessons classroom interaction. This was done till a high reliability coefficient was arrived at (().86) between the observers.

After training, the sample for the main study was selected. Stratified random sampling was used for this selection. All the selected teachers were observed teaching chemistry twice and a questionnaire of their undesirable behaviours was given to their students to respond to. This was done to every teacher. Using the overall responses to the questionnaires the teachers were divided into two groups, upper and lower. The median was used to divide these teachers. The upper group of chemistry teachers comprised those teachers seen by their students to have few undesirable behaviours and the lower group were those seen by their students to have many undesirable behaviours. For analysis of the relationship between teachers' classroom interaction and their undesirable behaviours, the classroom interaction patterns for these two groups were compared. The classroom interaction pattern were measured using the Flanders interaction analysis system. Both descriptive statistics and inferential statistics were used to analyze these classroom patterns. test was used for test of significant differences in the groups. The data obtained and analyzed revealed that teachers seen as having many undesirable behaviours (Lower group) used less praises, rewards, and encouragements during their classroom interaction unlike teachers seen by their students as having few undesirable behaviours (Upper group) who used relatively more praises, rewards and encouragements. Also the lower group used more criticism and commands than the upper group. Thus there was therefore a relationship between the teachers classroom interaction and his undesirable behaviours as seen by students. The study therefore recommends that more research on this line could be done, covering all teachers (trained and untrained) and all various types of secondary schools in Kenya in an effort to obtain a more comprehensive picture about the relationship between teachers' classroom interaction and their undesirable behaviours as seen by the students.