Practicum in host educational contexts: school students’ perceptions in Ecuador

Introduction Research on the practicum has focused on student teachers, mentors and partnerships between universities and schools, while the pupils in whose classrooms student teachers are placed have rarely been asked about this experience. This study examined how pupils in Ecuadorian host schools perceive the presence, support and influence of student teachers, and to what extent these perceptions can be trusted as evidence. Methods Two age-differentiated questionnaires, with pictographic scales from early childhood education to third grade and verbal scales from fourth grade onward, were administered through a mobile application by the student teachers or by members of the research team hired for data collection (project staff). The dataset comprised 2,453 valid evaluations from 1,140 pupils in 123 classrooms of 38 schools. Analyses included descriptive statistics for the first evaluation of each pupil, agreement between consecutive weekly evaluations, generalized estimating equations that accounted for the nesting of evaluations within pupils, classrooms and schools, a within-pupil comparison of evaluations collected by student teachers and by project staff, and latent class analysis. Results Between 91.5% and 98.5% of pupils gave favorable ratings on seven of eight items, while 69.6% of older pupils always felt comfortable asking student teachers for help. Ratings collected by project staff were lower than those collected by student teachers, especially for comfort in asking for help and perceived influence on learning. Responses of the youngest pupils concentrated in the highest category and did not discriminate reliably between individual pupils, whereas older pupils showed fair to moderate stability on most items and formed highly enthusiastic and moderately favorable profiles. Discussion Pupils perceive student teachers favorably, although part of this favorability reflects social desirability and the developmental limits of young respondents. Pupil voice can inform practicum evaluation when questionnaires are administered by someone other than the student teacher being evaluated and are interpreted according to the age of the pupils.