Dimensions and Orientations of Pre-Service Early Childhood Teachers’ Conceptions of Teaching Science

Early Childhood Education Journal - The purpose of the study was to investigate prospective early childhood teachers’ conceptions of teaching science, and thus identify their strategies for...     

Learning from our own lessons: pre-service teachers’ narratives of teaching as an experiment

Pre-service teachers need to develop habits of mind that allow them to grow as new teachers. This article describes an elementary mathematics methods course in which teaching as an experiment was used a framework for pre-service teachers to participate in action research by developing learning goals, observing and analyzing student thinking, hypothesizing and enacting teaching strategies, and reflecting on the effectiveness of a lesson. Through analysis of reflections and lesson plans, the article explores three groups of pre-service teachers’ reflections on teaching as well as their confidence across the semester. By treating lessons as experiments, the pre-service teachers were able to develop appropriate teaching responses over time as well as gain confidence in their abilities.     

Challenging a Teacher's Perceptions of Mathematical Smartness Through Reflections on Students’ Thinking

Creating equitable opportunities so all students can learn and succeed mathematically has been a key focus of mathematics education across several decades. Central to student achievement are students’ mathematical identity and their feelings of success during instruction. Researchers (e.g., Boaler & Staples, 2008) have shown that teachers can be particularly powerful in shaping students’ beliefs, feelings of success, and achievement, but few studies have investigated how teachers frame what it means to be successful or “smart” in mathematics. Through the social construct of smartness (Hatt, 2012) and the learning perspectives of incremental and entity theories (Blackwell, Trzesnieski, & Dweck, 2007; Yeager & Dweck, 2012), I examine how one teacher, Mrs. Purl, conceptualized what it meant to be smart in mathematics and how this perception changed slowly, over time, through repeated examination and discussion of individual student's thinking. As Mrs. Purl came to know her students at a personal level, she began to see that her perceptions were not always accurate and warranted reexamination.     

Effect of a Combined Repeated Reading and Question Generation Intervention on Reading Achievement

Research was conducted to ascertain if a combined repeated reading and question generation intervention was effective at improving the reading achievement of fourth through eighth grade students with learning disabilities or who were at risk for reading failure. Students were assigned to a treatment or control group via a stratified random sampling. Instructional components and training were based on best practices reported in the literature. Students receiving intervention significantly improved their reading speed and ability to answer inferential comprehension questions on passages that were reread. Compared to the control group, students in the intervention group also made significant gains in oral reading fluency on independent passages.