One of the most difficult jobs of elementary school teachers is teaching science for conceptual understanding. Conceptual understanding requires students to organize facts and ideas into a meaningful concept in science. Facts and concepts form webs that can help students make connections between the concepts of science and their experiences.…

August 2002 found the author scouring the rocky shore of Joggins, Nova Scotia, hunting for fossils dropped off by the last high tide. The experience highlighted the challenges of paleontology. She collected a bunch of rocks she thought had definite prints of plants or animals, but when she took them to the town's fossil museum, it turned out she…

In this article, the author introduces Peter Kinoti Inoti, the headmaster of a Kenyan primary school, who finds himself at the forefront of bringing AIDS education to a country that's remained silent about the disease for decades. Inoti, who had been a teacher at the primary level--grades 1-8--for more than two decades, juggles his duties as an…

Introducing Information Communication Technology (ICT) into schools heightens uncertainty due to the complexity and ambiguity of the process. By decomposition, articulation, and rationalization of ICT-based practices, teachers can better integrate it into the classroom; however, as literature deals with teachers' management of ICT integration,…

Elementary teachers' beliefs, knowledge, and practice relating to retention were explored using an adapted version of the Teacher Retention Beliefs Questionnaire (Tompchin & Impara, 1992). A researcher-developed knowledge section was added to the original questionnaire to measure teachers' propositional knowledge of retention. Thirty-five, K-4…

Educators often expect students with intellectual disabilities in inclusive elementary school classrooms to develop social competence through interactions with their peers. In this qualitative study, semi structured indepth interviews were used to investigate elementary school teachers' perspectives on student social competence, the quality of…

Evaluations, tied to specific programmes, need to be complemented by research that is more sensitive to context at the classroom level. A comparative approach may be used as a platform to move into a two-way conversation with the perspectives of practitioners in 'developing' countries and hence scrutinize internationally dominant notions of good…

Studied teacher attitudes toward high-stakes and mandated testing in two New York elementary schools. Findings show high-stakes tests forced teachers to act in ways they did not think were professional and required instructional environments teachers did not think were conducive to student success. (SLD)

This paper explores new elementary teachers' instructional representations and how these are related to their science subject matter knowledge. One pair of prospective elementary teachers studied here exhibited a well-integrated, principled, and scientifically accurate understanding of the science they were teaching. The other pair exhibited less…

Each year the TECA (Technology Education Collegiate Association) Eastern Regional conference is held in Virginia Beach, Virginia. TECA is made up of four regions of the United States. The eastern TECA region has the largest membership. From up and down the eastern U.S., students and faculty from colleges' and universities' technology education…

In this article, the author shares how she turned once-dreaded parent-teacher conferences into valuable assessments, evaluations, and action plans using the fourth-generation evaluation method. Fourth-generation evaluation has three main components. First, it includes a multitude of assessment tools. Second, it involves stakeholders in the…

Some primary school teachers may neglect reasoning about art. Models of practice can exemplify classroom teaching and, to some extent, a textbook for children can be seen as a model of practice. Can those in art serve as models of practice and help teachers foster reasoning? This study examined 19 art textbooks intended for use by Key Stage 2…

In this paper we examine the nature of our self-study practices in an elementary teacher education cohort called CITE (Community and Inquiry in Teacher Education). We argue that self-study is not only important to our continued work in CITE but also a critical feature of professional practice in general. Two general questions frame our analysis:…

Office disciplinary referrals can be a useful index for assessing students? discipline problems as well as designing and evaluating school discipline practices. In this paper, we examined disciplinary referral data compiled from an urban elementary school (majority African American) in a midwestern city over a 2-year period. Evident issues…

This paper draws on a research study of elementary- and secondary-route preservice teachers in a two-year, after-degree teacher preparation programme. The paper includes excerpts of classroom data, taken from the author's own university classroom, demonstrating preservice teachers' responses to carefully selected video extracts of children…