"Not reading," even for many good students, has become a mode of operation with respect to book-length texts assigned in school. Many students enter secondary and postsecondary literature classes "intending" to "not read" the books teachers assign. More students than teachers want to admit do not complete assigned reading, choosing instead to…

A study of new teachers with science degrees but little or no training in education found that coaches who spent time in their classrooms provided the most effective support for new teachers. Science methods courses provided by a university also were very helpful for the new teacher. But academic mentors for science content and teacher mentors who…

This article details a field-based methods course for preservice teachers that has been designed to integrate shared teaching experiences in elementary classrooms with ongoing critical dialogues with a focus on highlighting the complexities of teaching. I describe the structure of the course and explore the use of coteaching and cogenerative…

We incorporated an active, collaborative-based research project in our undergraduate Research Methods course for first-year sports medicine majors. Working in small groups, students identified a research question, generated a hypothesis to be tested, designed an experiment, implemented the experiment, analyzed the data, and presented their…

The Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework is a relatively new construct that offers a useful perspective from which to understand the development of pre-service teachers' abilities in teaching with technology. It is grounded in the understanding that if teachers are to effectively integrate technology into their…

A dialogic approach to teaching and learning is not a new phenomenon. However, using technology as a mediated platform (email, Skype and blackboard) to allow pre-service teachers in two culturally and linguistically diverse countries to openly communicate and share ideas about teaching and learning is somewhat unique. The present study reports on…

The purpose of this study was to explore the extent to which the mission of preparing teachers to teach for social justice is operationalized within the methods courses in teacher preparation programs that assert a social justice mission. A qualitative content analysis was conducted of course syllabi for English/Language Arts courses, using a…

In an attempt to analyse more closely the training experiences of pre-service teachers, the author conducted an exploratory quasi-experimental study at a university located in the Rocky Mountain region of the USA. All students who were enrolled in the same reading methods course (but enrolled in different sections) were invited to participate in…

In an effort to teach students the basic knowledge of research methods and the realities of conducting research in the context of agencies in the community, faculty developed and implemented a service learning model for teaching research and program evaluation to foundation-year MSW students. A year-long foundation course was designed in which one…

This quantitative investigation examined the influence of low and high self-efficacy on candidate teacher academic performance in a foreign language teaching methodology course through testing the speculation that high self-efficacy levels would improve pedagogical-content knowledge (PCK). Positivism guided the research design at the levels of…

This research study examined the development of 43 preservice elementary school teachers' conceptual understanding of place value after participating in a research-based constructivist unit of instruction in place value. The preservice teachers were enrolled in one of three terms of an elementary mathematics methods course in a private midwestern…

Background/Context: Discussion is central to mathematics teaching and learning, as well as to mathematics as an academic discipline. Studies have shown that facilitating discussions is complex work that is not easily done or learned. To make such complex aspects of the work of teaching learnable by beginners, recent research has focused on…

This study examined preservice teachers' understanding of biotechnology and its related processes. A sample comprised 88 elementary education preservice teachers at a large university in the Midwest of the USA. A total of 60 and 28 of the participants were enrolled in introductory and advanced science methods courses, respectively. Most…

Preservice teachers need both awareness of and skill with the latest digital technologies in order to use these tools effectively in their teaching. Historically in our university, this preparation has been reserved for a stand-alone information technology course focused on learning how to use various computer-based programs. However, more direct…

Given students' preconceptions of history as fixed information, cultivating students' interpretive and evidence-based thinking is foundational to advancing their disciplinary understanding. This study examines the ways in which preservice history teachers construct tasks that demand students' interpretive and evidence-based thinking and attend to…