Assessing Levels of Student Understanding in Pre-Service Teachers Using A Two-Cycle SOLO Model

Source: Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, Volume 37, Issue 3,
pages 283 - 293 (August 2009).

This article reports the findings of an exploratory study concerning the development of higher-order conceptual understanding of Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) among physical education pre-service teachers. The development of such understandings has been seen as problematic among pre-service teachers (Randall, 2003).
An analysis of the responses given in a high-stakes examination of 165 pre-service physical education teachers was used to investigate varying levels of understanding in TGfU pedagogy.
This article reports specific examples of student responses in a written high-stakes examination. Furthermore, the article also justifies how a two-cycle structure of the observed learning outcome (SOLO) model can discriminate between the demonstrations of surface and deep conceptual understandings.