Preservice teachers often enter English language arts teacher preparation courses with untapped fears of writing and teaching writing due to null or bad experiences as K-12 students. In this article, I follow two preservice elementary teachers through a semester long methods course and reveal how they developed positive, clear images of themselves…

In this article, the authors try to extend the complex and provocative conversations at the Conference on English Education Summit. They argue on several critical programmatic issues, including the need for greater program coherence, the continuing dilemma of the gulf between schools and universities, and both the promise and the problems of…

The purpose of this study was to identify and compare the teaching concerns of two groups of preservice teachers who were taught language arts methodology through the use of different approaches. A traditional approach (lectures and demonstrations by the professor) was used with one group (n=43) and a field-experience approach (lectures by the…

This study explored whether the addition of visual examples through laser disc instruction influenced the learning and application of convergent and divergent questioning techniques and wait-time by preservice elementary education teachers during their clinical experience. The study compared the difference in the frequency of convergent and…

A common belief among teacher educators is that different academic backgrounds may influence student entry level and rates of matriculation through the curriculum. This report describes a study using a "pretest/posttest" method to evaluate student academic progression, and to determine variance in scores between two groups of graduate students…

Preservice teachers must see appropriate instruction in action; they must see content in conjunction with process. Content, process, and active student involvement are necessary for the creation of new cognitive structures that are congruent with the view that reading is an interactive-constructive process. Three types of literacy course…

This paper describes multiculturalism courses in teacher education at Bethany College (California) and at the University of Southern Mississippi and argues that an increasingly global society creates the need for unity that can be achieved through multicultural education, which if effectively designed and implemented enlightens individuals to the…

Public schools are increasingly investigating portfolio assessment as a means of evaluating student performance. A project examined student participation in portfolio assessment and cooperative learning in a "Reading in the Content Areas" class for preservice teachers. Students were a diverse group which included preservice middle school…

This paper is a progress report on an ongoing, longitudinal study of the preparation of preservice elementary teachers in science. The study builds on previous work and explores the experiences of an intake of preservice students in 1994. These students were required to take a core course in science content in their foundation and subsequently a…

A study investigated the effects on student teachers of peer responses offered through dialogue journals on English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teacher education. Subjects were nine students in a student teaching seminar, all involved in practicums in public high schools. Over 15 weeks, students wrote journal entries both on selected topics from…

A survey instrument was developed to examine preservice teachers' understanding of classroom issues related to exceptional needs and cultural diversity. The instrument was administered to 832 preservice teachers at universities in Alabama, Michigan, Montana, New York, and Washington at 3 levels (beginning, middle, and end of program). Data are…

This study examined elementary teacher candidates' understanding of how history is "made" by historians and how texts are analyzed in the process of historical inquiry. Interviews with three elementary student teachers enrolled at a large southwestern state university indicated that they all had a markedly limited background in academic history.…

The purpose of this causal-comparative study was to compare reasoning level, American College Test (ACT) science, process skills, and physical science misconceptions of preservice elementary and secondary science teachers and to investigate gender differences. The stratified randomly drawn sample (n=68) consisted of preservice elementary and…

In this paper, Luther College and the Decorah (Iowa) Public Schools suggest that a clinical model for field experience offers a better approach to the problem of teacher empowerment. The model, which shifts instructional methods and student teaching to a public school that consciously identifies itself as a teacher training institution, enhances…

This 1993 yearbook presents 20 papers and summaries of the dissertation award winner "Content Literacy in High School Social Studies: A Focus on One Teacher's Beliefs and Decisions about Classroom Discussions" (E. G. Sturtevant) and the thesis award winner "Effects of Direct Instruction of Story Grammar on Story Writing and Reading…