Apprehensions and Expectations of Preservice Teachers relative to Practicum during Pandemic: A Sentiment and Qualitative Analysis

Abstract

The study aimed to surface the apprehension and expectation of pre-service teachers in their practicum during the pandemic. The study used text mining, sentiment analysis, and qualitative-descriptive method in analyzing the apprehension and expectation of the participants relative to their practicum during the pandemic. Online, learning, and class appeared to be the top three frequently appeared words in the corpus while positive, trust, and anticipation garnered the highest emotional affect scores. Meanwhile, lack of actual exposures and failure to develop rapport were the source of apprehension of the participants while new learning amid challenging situation and more developed and capable self to address challenges were their expectations in their practicum amid the pandemic. The participants are eager to return to traditional face-to-face classes for their practicum despite the threat posed by the on-going pandemic. They are fully aware of what student teaching requires of them and can do for them which are highly technical and social in nature. Finally, optimism and resiliency of participants were surfaced when asked about their expectations in their student teaching amid the pandemic. It is recommended to apply new and other existing text mining analytical techniques to further analyze the text datasets in this study. A large dataset is also recommended for future analysis. This study also offered the potential use of the findings of this study to make informed decisions and policies to both educational institutions and educators.