Development of an Aiding Tool for Classroom Action Research in Pre-Service Teacher Education

In teacher education programs, pre-service teachers need professional teaching practice in schools, including teaching, classroom action research, and related activities. According to the Teachers' Council professional standard requirements, they need to conduct action research on one topic each semester. These requirements can be challenging, especially during the school internship. They face difficulties in lacking statistics software tools, selecting proper statistics, and seeking advice from statistics teachers with time constraints. Thus, the current study aims to develop a web application as an aiding tool for classroom action research that students can study by themselves anywhere and anytime. This tool was used as a free learning aid. The study also compares the effectiveness of technology-based learning between the proposed web application and similar educational tools that students use. This web application was designed with three main functions: an introductory statistics lesson, data analysis, and a recommendation for statistics selection. In the first function, the content offers basic research and statistics. In the data analysis function, preservice teachers can upload the data files and choose the preferred statistics. The last function is a recommendation for statistics selection. If students do not know which statistics they should use, the recommendation function suggests statistics based on their data. The participants included 20 pre-service teachers studying in the fifth year of an electrical technology education program and act as a college teacher who taught about electrical, electronic, or computer subjects. The assessments were developed to validate the current tool's effectiveness. The results found that the current tool helped the pre-service teachers confirm the selection of the statistical method from their own thinking. Some students reflected that the more understanding of the research content, the clearer understanding of the statistical method would be used. In addition, they reflected that the web application was convenient and easy to use, especially when they were in school and lacked a statistics software license. The contribution of this study is to promote students' understanding of statistics usage in classroom-action research based on a technology-enhanced learning tool.