The Impact of demographic factors on pre-service teachers’ perception of Educational Research: Findings from a private university

Abstract

The current study sought to identify the effects of democratic factors on the perception of pre-service teachers (with diploma as their highest level of education) on the teaching and learning of the Educational Research course during the fall 2017 semester in one of the private universities in Ghana. With a survey research design, three hundred and twenty (320) pre-service teachers, who were enrolled in the fall 2017 sandwich programme, were randomly sampled to participate in the study. The findings revealed significant differences between male and female pre-service teachers perception of the teaching of research, relevance of research and their statistics anxiety. Also, the age independent variable indicated a significant difference on the statistics anxiety construct only whereas the other two constructs were not significant. There were significant correlations among age, years of teaching, and statistics anxiety. The implication of the study for practice is discussed.