| Belonging to teachers’ individual characteristics, teacher competency refers to the professional knowledge, skills and values that are mastered by teachers and essential for successful teaching. For the investigation of teacher competency, we not only need to answer the question of whether in-service teachers can be competent for the current occupation, but also require to make response to the problem of whether pre-service teachers who will enter the working stations quickly can be competent for the future job. Studies that mainly focus on pre-service teacher competency are conductive to discover normal university students’ potential characteristics for excellent performances in the future and could provide evidences to support the improvement of teacher education model through exploring the influencing factors.This study aimed to explore the development and features of normal university students’ teacher competency during the whole stage of teacher education. At the same time, standing on the point of positive psychology, we chose two positive factors which both had close relationship with students’ study and daily life, that was ’degree of enjoyment of major’ and ’satisfaction of campus life’, to discuss the relationship between them and normal university students’ teacher competency. In addition, this study also examined effects of teaching practice on the development of senior normal university students’ teacher competency.Specifically, Teacher’s Competency Questionnaire designed by previous researcher was utilized to complete 157 normal university students’ follow-up evaluations in three consecutive years. Also, they were recruited to evaluate on scales about their degree of enjoyment of major and their satisfaction of campus life. Considering the normal university investigated would organize students to take teaching practice in the junior grade, we also gathered information about the participants’ teaching practice in the third investigation.We used SPSS16.0 and HLM6.0 for statistical analysis and the main research results were as follows:First, normal university students’ teacher competency was at an overall high level during the whole stage of teacher education; as the grade level rose, teacher competency dimensions tended to a high and stable average and deepened from surface to inner on developmental hierarchy. On the whole, from freshman to junior year, students’ top four teacher competency dimensions were’focus on students’ needs’,’interpersonal communication’,’relationship building’and’expertise’. Ranking the last was ’respect for others’. Dimensions ranked in the middle expressed some changes in three years.Second, normal university students’teacher competency showed a stable development with the grade level rose, and there demonstrated no significant difference between different grades; the factor of gender influenced teacher competency significantly with the result that in comparison with male students, female students did better on the following five teacher competency dimensions, that was ’focus on students’ needs’,’expertise’,’interpersonal communication’, ’relationship building’, ’information gathering’and the overall teacher competency.Third, in different grades, degree of enjoyment of major influenced normal university students’’occupational preference’ notably; and satisfaction of campus life had a significant effect on’understanding of others’. Students who enjoyed their major showed higher level of’occupational preference’, and those who were satisfied with their campus life did better on ’understanding of others’.Forth, teaching practice played a remarkable role in promoting normal university students’’relationship building’. Specifically, students who took part in teaching practice showed notable higher difference between pre-test and post-test scores on ’relationship building’in comparison with those who didn’t, while the difference was not significant on the other dimensions and the overall teacher competency. |
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