Teacher educators, administrators, policy-makers, and novice and advanced teacher candidates can achieve educational success and advance high-quality teacher preparation programmes. To do this, they must identify and cultivate positive dispositions for professional competence, commitment, and success in teaching children and adolescents.…

In an era of teacher shortages, what would motivate individuals to become teachers when the demands on teachers are greater than ever and there are plenty of alternative occupations from which to choose? This paper presents the findings of a study of student teachers' motivations to be primary teachers and their commitment to teaching after their…

This study examined the science and mathematics instruction of teachers who were initially prepared by the Collaboratives for Excellence in Teacher Preparation program (CETP). The focus of this study was on examining the extent to which science and mathematics teachers used more reform-oriented instructional practices in their classes when they…

This investigation delineates a multi-year action research agenda designed to develop an instructional model for teaching the nature of science (NOS) to preservice science teachers. Our past research strongly supports the use of explicit reflective instructional methods, which includes Thomas Kuhn's notion of learning by ostention and treating…

Examining how preservice teachers (PTs) perceive and implement assessment may provide clues as to how we can refocus the way future teachers use assessment. A conceptual framework addressing PT beliefs and how they change was applied in this study to examine PTs' (N = 17) beliefs and understanding of the role of assessment and evaluation on…

Two labs incorporating the Science Writing Heuristic are described that introduce scientific inquiry in a course for preservice students majoring in elementary education. One lab adapts a previously described discovery learning opportunity involving the change in composition and mass of pennies in 1982. The other involves the use of flotation…

"The great teacher is not the man [or woman] who supplies the most facts, but the one in whose presence we become different people." This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson is an important reminder that education involves more than just teaching academic content and meeting state, or national, standards. Teachers inspire, encourage, challenge,…

This study was designed to explore pre-service computer teachers' perception of motivation and response to an instruction based on self-regulated learning strategies. A pre-experimental method was used in this research. Data were collected through the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire developed by Pintrich and others (1993) and the…

This mixed methods study investigated the extent to which preservice teachers' discipline orientations are consistent with their perceptions of what makes an effective teacher. The study's first purpose was to determine whether preservice teachers tend to possess a predominant discipline style. The second purpose was to ascertain the degree to…

In this article we used an orienting framework of interactional ethnography to make visible classrooms acting as cultures. We examined the interactional patterns from two different classrooms as participants jointly negotiated and constructed meaning. We first demonstrated how participants began to construct a classroom culture in the first weeks…

In this article, the author describes a service learning experience that allowed university students to work with culturally and linguistically diverse children as a partial requirement for an introductory level course in Early Childhood Education. Data from the journals and case studies indicated that preservice teachers benefited from this…

Current educational reform movements emphasize preparing teachers for pedagogical problem solving in the classroom. This study examines the impact of problem-based learning on prospective teachers' problem-solving abilities. Two classes of prospective teachers were included in this study. The experimental class used problem-based learning while…

One semester while attempting to help pre-service teachers learn how to make mathematics relevant to the lives of young children, it occurred to the author that many preservice teachers in teacher education programs were uncomfortable outside of their own personal cultural experiences. Having recently read some work of Claudia Zavslavsky (1996),…

Prospective teachers' (PT) beliefs and views regarding teaching and learning affect the way they teach after they have graduated. Often, these views are a consequence of their past experience as pupils themselves. In recent years there has been a great effort toward changing the teaching and learning of mathematics, which raises the need to…

Although effective practices have been developed to address the needs of a wide range of students with disabilities, evidence suggests a limited use of these practices. Potential contributors to the research-to-practice gap focus on problems with pre-service teacher preparation, professional development, and the nature of research. The authors…