RESEARCH ON SOFT SKILLS WITH UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS OF FACULTIES OF EDUCATION IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC

The article focuses on selected soft skills (particularly communication, team co-operation, problem-solving, autonomy, creativeness, performance, responsibility and the ability to develop new skills) with undergraduate students of faculties of education (expected pre-service teachers) in the Czech Republic.

In the theoretical part:
(1) basic models of pre-service teacher education applied in the Czech Republic and reflecting the Lisbon process are presented,
(2) the soft skills and other competencies required from pre-service teachers are analyzed and discussed. In the empirical part, results of the research conducted on the sample of 1,032 respondents, undergraduate students of faculties of education, are displayed and analyzed.

The research sample was divided in two groups:
(1) students who do not intend to become teachers after graduation from faculties of education (N = 520);
(2) students who decided during the studies to work as teachers after graduation (N = 512). Respondents´ feedback was collected through the 80-item questionnaire exploring five-point interval scale.

The questionnaire focused on respondents´ self-evaluation of the above listed soft skills. Collected data underwent the normal distribution tests and consequently were processed by appropriate statistical methods (e.g. ANOVA). The results discovered statistically significant differences in the level of self-assessment in single skills and competences, e.g. students not planning to work as teachers reached lower scores in the field of communication (compared to those respondents who intended to become teachers); however, they had higher scores of self-assessment e.g. in the field of performance.