Framed by occupational socialization theory (Lawson, 1986), the purpose of this research was to examine perspectives of one university faculty member, eleven pre-service teachers and two cooperating teachers while enacting two clinically rich methods courses in a physical education teacher education program. We analyzed the data (researcher notes,…

The current chapter aimed at investigating language students' perceptions of peer assessment of the group members' contribution to group work. The research context of the study included the department of foreign language education at a state university in Burdur, Turkey. The participants were 35 students enrolled at the third-year class entitled…

Background/Context: The disparity between the race and ethnicity of teachers and students is expected to increase as our nation and classrooms continue to become more racially, ethnically, linguistically, and economically diverse. It is extremely important to think about not only the educational needs of such a diverse student population within…

To guide and support teacher candidates in developing the knowledge and skills they need in the classroom, teacher preparation programs must prepare students in acquiring the experience and expertise needed to demonstrate mastery of general knowledge in the specific subject or content area. In addition, teacher preparation programs must support…

Ethnically unfamiliar literature can provide opportunities for teacher candidates to expand their repertoire of available texts to better support students in their care. However, ethnically unfamiliar literatures can be difficult for readers to understand and appreciate. This article addresses this disconnect by infusing multicultural literature…

The high attrition rate of new science teachers demonstrates the urgent need to incorporate effective practices in teacher preparation programs to better equip preservice science teachers. The purpose of the study is to demonstrate a way to enrich preservice science teachers' preparation by incorporating informal science teaching practice into…

Increasing evidence, both in general education and music education, points to the significance of inquiry as a part of teacher preparation. The purpose of this case study was to investigate the ways in which an introductory research project would help preservice music educators understand good "music teaching" and to discover the extent…

This research investigates relationships between prospective teachers' self-efficacy of literacy instruction and their growing knowledge of literacy essentials. An instrument was used that is one part self-ratings of confidence levels in teaching specific literacy skills and one part assessment of literacy knowledge required to teach those skills.…

Illiteracy is on the rise in the United States, and the potential negative impact on today's struggling reader is devastating. Now more than ever, preparing pre-service teachers to be effective teachers of literacy is crucial. This study examined the growth in understandings of best practice literacy of eleven pre-service teachers through paired…

Despite widespread discourse about the need for teachers to utilize education research, little is known about how teachers learn to engage in this practice. How do preservice teachers understand the use of research to inform their teaching? Set within the context of a mathematics methods course, this study provides a detailed analysis of the…

In this paper, we utilize practitioner research to consider what happened in two literacy methods courses when we positioned students as human beings in the present rather than solely as future teachers. We first situate our work within the current sociopolitical context of the U.S., making the argument that critical literacy education is more…

This article addresses the problem of how opportunities to learn in teacher education programs influence future elementary mathematics teachers' knowledge. This study used data collected for the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M). TEDS-M measured the mathematics content knowledge (MCK) and the mathematics pedagogical…

This study investigates the learning reported by a set of volunteer participants from three university teacher education programs: from one Southwestern U.S. University, the program in secondary English/Language Arts Education and the program in Elementary Education; and from one Southeastern U.S. University, the program in secondary…

While many research methods courses challenge students to make sense of their own researcher identities as they relate to research paradigms and perspectives, there is a lack of research that examines how students actually go about constructing these identities, particularly at the level of discourse. In this study, we attended to graduate…

This study describes a personal science story podcasting assignment that was developed to help preservice teachers reflect on their use of everyday and academic vocabulary in the context of science, as well as how to communicate effectively with their students. Podcasting assignments were collected from 16 elementary education candidates and nine…