Abstract
As we want the students to be able to analyze and work with information, it is necessary to enhance such competence of the potential teachers in particular. The "teacher as researcher" is becoming synonymous with the "teacher as professional", who keeps track in self-development and is involved in research.
Therefore, we have conducted a content analysis to find out the methodology level of would-be biology teachers' theses, because we believe such an analysis is one of the possible ways of gaining an idea about the success of future teachers' preparation. We analyzed all these (n=199) defended at both departments that prepare biology teachers in Prague, Czech Republic in years 2014-2016.
We identified 80 main or supplementary pieces of research, mainly quantitative (77%), the most frequently used tool for acquiring data was a questionnaire (61%). Although many of these researches were methodologically acceptable, we found a large number of fundamental methodological misconduct - 41% cases do not specify the method of sampling, 90% questionnaire-based researches use newly constructed research tool and 61% of them were done without pilot tool validation; 62% of researches presented data without even basic statistical processing.
There was a significant difference between two faculties in methodological practice we believe to be caused by including a specialized course in study plan. A further research on building would-be teachers pedagogical research methodology knowledge is needed to investigate how to best fulfill an idea of "teacher as professional".