A study of 100 geographers during their first year of full-time college teaching revealed that the teachers had difficulty in achieving their educational goals. The worst areas of performance by the new teachers included knowing how to stimulate students to high intellectual effort and changing teaching methods as appropriate. (RM)

This policy brief draws together research, ideas, and initiatives on improving teaching quality, especially materials from states in the Mid-Continent Regional Educational Laboratory's region. It is intended to help policymakers think about which policies might foster improved teacher quality and how to combine policies into an integrated strategy…

Perception of teaching affects teaching practice. Process-product orientation presumes too much causal relationship between teaching and learning, and requires more teacher accountability than is realistic/necessary. Different conceptions of teaching facilitate inquiry into teaching excellence, with essential factors being teacher…

Examines forces that shape the design of assessment systems for teachers and some inherent contradictions with regard to curriculum and assessment. Proposes a system of assessment that is continuous, dynamic, and principled and does not remove from teachers the responsibility of defining what is important to student learning. (SD)

Presents survey results that reveal that most political science departments have clearly defined systems of summative teaching evaluation. These systems, however, lack diversity. Most rely solely on student assessment and use this primarily to identify potential problems. Recommends adopting more flexible and constructive approaches. (MJP)

Reports research to assess the performance of teachers who graduated from 11 universities, 7 with 5-year programs and 4 considering moving into 5-year programs. Provides results of data collected around four outcome measures: teacher entry into the profession, teacher retention, classroom performance, and leadership behavior. (SM)

This study of student teachers used concept maps, the Virginia observation system for evaluation of beginning teachers, and a specific procedure to assess pupil responses to lessons. Results supported a relationship between student teachers' behavioral and cognitive domains. Patterns of pupil responses varied according to the planning perspectives…

A total of 98 elementary school teachers described their strategies for dealing with problem students and the ways in which they would handle incidents presented in 2 vignettes. Teachers usually reported the same strategies but differed in the coherence and elaboration with which they articulated the strategies. (MDM)

It is argued that teacher assessment should be extended to include students' learning gains. The conditions that must be met for such an assessment system to be implemented are described, and some alternative strategies for extending the focus of teacher evaluation and program evaluation to include student learning are discussed. (SLD)

This study examined the word-structure knowledge of novice teachers and the progress of children tutored by a subgroup of the teachers. Teachers' word-structure knowledge was assessed using three tasks: graphophonemic segmentation, classification of pseudowords by syllable type, and classification of real words as phonetically regular or…

This book focuses on how school administrators deal with the problem of teacher incompetence. Data were derived from three research studies conducted in California: interviews with 30 school administrators; a mailed survey of 141 school district superintendents; and a case study of a school district with a relatively high rate of induced teacher…

A university and participating school districts cooperatively developed a 15-month graduate program to certify secondary mathematics and science teachers. A study of the program's instructional model examined three areas: whether knowledge of instructional variables related to occurrence of the variables during classroom instruction by teaching…

This paper presents an approach to the evaluation of college faculty teaching which stresses input from students, colleagues, the department head, and the faculty member under review. Evaluation guidelines suggest that evaluation criteria and the measurement process, as well as the instruments used for measuring teacher performance, be jointly…

The knowledge and abilities are available today to ensure that teacher preparation programs graduate only potentially superior teachers. Process-product research of the past decade has confirmed many aspects of what superior teachers in prior times knew only intuitively. To aid in the organization of this research the acronym TEMPO can be used. T…

At the College of the Canyons in California, the majority of faculty are adjunct instructors, many of whom have had little formal background in teaching. In an effort to support these faculty and to assure the quality of instruction, the Associate Program for Adjunct Instructors was instituted. The program emphasizes the development and evaluation…