Pre-Service Teachers’ Perceptions of the Relevance of Teacher Professional Ethics in Contemporary Lesotho
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous research suggests that new teachers have more negative ethical perceptions than their senior counterparts. However, there is limited research on teachers’ perceptions regarding the relevance of professional ethics in the contemporary world. Hence this study sought to explore the extent to which pre-service teachers in Lesotho consider professional ethics to be relevant. A qualitative approach was adopted and Kohlberg’s (1987) moral development theory was used as the theoretical framework for the study. Data were generated with the use of both semi-structured and focus-group interviews. Forty-six (n 46) final-year Bachelor of Education (BEd) students were purposively selected to take part in this study. Sixteen (16) were interviewed individually, while 30 were interviewed in three focus-groups of ten participants each. The findings are that the participating pre-service teachers had mixed feelings about the relevance of professional ethics of teachers. Some emphasised the importance of a teachers’ code of ethics while others indicated that some of the regulations were outdated. The position taken in this paper is that teacher professional ethics are timeless. These are meant to protect the interests of different stakeholders in education as well as the image of the teaching profession.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".