Beyond Technical Teacher Education: Effects of a Dialectical Program on Pre-Service Teachers' Reflective Practice

Abstract

Initial teacher education faces the challenge of fostering reflective practice that goes beyond the technical aspects of teaching, and evidence on programs structured within a dialectical framework remains scarce. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of the “Dialectical Reflection” program on the development of reflective practice among education students at a public university in Ayacucho, Peru. A quasi-experimental design was adopted with a control group (n= 42) and an experimental group (n= 31), evaluated using a pretest-posttest strategy. The intervention took place between May and July 2025 through sixteen in-person sessions organized into three units based on the laws of materialist dialectics. Reflective practice was measured using a 19-item Likert scale questionnaire with three dimensions, which demonstrated adequate reliability (?= 0.91). The assumptions of normality and homogeneity of variances were verified prior to inferential analysis. No differences were found between the groups on the pretest, a finding that confirmed their equivalence at baseline. The experimental group showed an increase between the pretest and the posttest [t(30)= 15.77; p< 0.001; d= 2.83)], but the control group remained stable [t(41)= 0.44; p= 0.661)]. In the post-test, the experimental group outperformed the control group in overall reflective practice and in its three dimensions (d ranging from 2.01 to 4.15). It was concluded that the program had a positive and sustained effect on reflective practice, thereby providing empirical evidence of the value of structured dialectical interventions for initial teacher education.