Abstract
The safety of students is the highest priority in schools. In order to increase the awareness of possible accidents during science classes, a role-play exercise by teachers in training was carried out. The exercise was conducted during a compulsory class entitled “Practical Seminar for Teaching Professionals” for students who will become science teachers and school nurses. In this paper, we analyze the learning effects of the practical exercise. The survey was conducted through questionnaires completed by the students before and after the lesson. The Wilcoxon signed rank test and text mining of the free-text answers were used to analyze the questionnaires in order to show changes in the students' self-efficacy and knowledge gained from the practical exercise. The results of the analysis showed that the exercise improved their self-efficacy in managing accidents at school. In addition, the text-mining results suggested that these future science teachers and school nurses learned skills for coping with accidents, and also learned from each other by working together in a collaborative class. Furthermore, these results suggest that this practical exercise follows the guidelines for the Practical Seminar for Teaching Professionals provided by MEXT.
