Students' Stories of Their Best and Poorest K-5 Teachers: A Mixed Data Analysis

In this study, a multi-stage mixed analysis was used to examine stories from 72 undergraduate teacher education students regarding their best and poorest K-5 teachers, alongside responses to Likert-format survey items. Participants expressed strong agreement with items derived from the literature concerning characteristics of effective teachers (quantitative analysis phase). Themes from their stories were derived and exemplar stories of best and of poorest teachers are provided (qualitative analysis phase). Qualitative data were quantitized and statistically analyzed (quantitative analysis phase), revealing that five best K-5 teacher themes discriminated the students' ethnicity and six best K-5 teacher themes discriminated the students' major. Thus, this investigation provides a compelling example of the role that mixed analyses can play in identifying preservice teachers' perceptions. (Contains 3 tables.)