Polythetic spaces of type-building qualitative content analyses in revealing teachers’ reflective thinking

Abstract

The aim of the study is to apply the polythetic spaces of Type-build qualitative content analysis in revealing a novice teacher’s reflective thinking. The present study, which focuses on research methodology, draws attention to the structure and multidimensionality of Type-building qualitative content analysis. Progression in reflective thinking has been investigated by means of structured reflective diaries in the first six years of teaching. At the end of the third and sixth years the teacher answered questions as follows: What do I do well? Why? How do I know the way of doing it? What are those areas I have problems with? Why? Where do I make mistakes? What opportunities do I have for further progress? Text corpora have been processed by the polythetic space generation of qualitative content analysis. In this multidimensional space of analysis results demonstrated an increasing complexity of reflections over time. After the third year, reflections were at technical level and provided answers to the question of ’What?’. After the sixth year, however, they were related to the general understanding of teachers’ practice and were expanded with reflections that provide answers to questions like ’Why?’ and ’How do I know the way of doing it?’. Reflections have contributed to the differentiation of pedagogical knowledge. During the course of reflection teachers can develop a system of complex theoretical and practice-oriented knowledge that can be applied to the entire teaching activity.