International Teacher Education Conference 2014 1

International Teacher Education Conference 2014
Time Impact on Training Effectiveness of Physics Teachers in Saudi Arabia
Yousef Alhaggass a *
ª Postgraduate student, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia
Abstract
Teachers’ professional development is a vital component of any educational system. Therefore, the policy of
education in addition to the legislation of civil service in Saudi Arabia confirmed that training of teachers is a
continuous process and considered as a part of their jobs both during working hours and out of working hours.
The Ten-Year Plan of the Ministry of Education also included the improvement of male and female teachers’
quality (General Directorate of Planning, 2005).
Although there is a large number of professional development activities for teachers, students’ achievement in
physics are not satisfied according to the Department of Educational Supervision (2010). Poor practice of
physics education is still dominated in schools and consequently, the desired outcomes of learning physics are
not achieved properly.
This situation generated the need to evaluate the effectiveness of the actual professional development practices
as a first step to identify improvement strategies for physics teachers, and ultimately improve outcomes for
students.
Keywords. In-service teacher education, Andragogy
LITERATURE REVIEW
Research shows that learners’ achievements can be affected by the duration of professional learning program.
For example, from a database consisting of 446,000 student enrollments at Santa Monica College, students
enrolled in the 6-week compressed sections had higher success rates than those enrolled in the same courses
during a 16-week semester as reported by Logan and Geltner (2000). In addition, Austin, and Gustafson (2006)
investigated the link between course length and student learning using a database of over 45,000 observations
and they found that intensive courses do result in higher grades than traditional 16 week semester length courses
and that this benefit peaks at about 4 weeks. Furthermore, Shaw, Porter and ten Brinke, (2011) evaluated the
effectiveness of one-day training on a deception detection task attended by 42 legal and mental health
professionals and they found that participants’ overall performance increased significantly from 46.4% to 80.9%.
On the other hand, for the same course taught in both intensive and traditional formats within the same year,
Kucsera and Zimmaro (2010) affirmed that intensive courses did not significantly differ from traditional courses
in overall "instructor" ratings on learner evaluations.
Research also shows that memory in addition to attention levels are affected by the instruction period
throughout the day (Klein, 2001) and hence, impact learners’ achievement. For example, the result of a study
carried out by Barron, et al. (1994) indicated an overall increase in mean scores for the below-grade-level
students' mastery of reading skills for afternoon instruction as compared with morning instruction. In addition,
according to Spickler, Hernandez-Azarraga and Komorowski (1997), science teachers achieved many desired
outcomes during the after-school hands-on science program. Furthermore, in order to examine the influence of
time-of-day on elementary students' accuracy in computing mathematical algorithms, a study was conducted by
Sjosten-Bell ( 2005) and an examination of the mean scores showed a trend toward higher scores in the morning
followed by the mid-morning then the afternoon. Ray (2009) also, investigated the interactive effect of class
time-of-day on students’ academic performances of Basic Statistics-I course in Liberal Arts College and the
results showed that the afternoon hours impacted academic performance significantly and in a negative manner.
Based on what research has revealed, it can be noticed that short-term memory is better in the morning, while
long-term memory is better in the afternoon (Jensen, 2000). As a result, learning activities involving short-term
E-mail address: haggass@yahoo.com
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