The establishment of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards in 1987 and the Interstate New Teachers Assessment and Support Consortium (IN-TASC) in 1992 called for the development of performance-based assessment for teacher certification. This paralleled the development of curriculum standards and standardized achievement testing in K-12 educational settings. It has been our expe...

Interpreting changing levels of self-efficacy while improving effective teaching behaviors can be one goal of teacher education programs. Undergraduate education majors often begin their teacher education programs with high levels of self-efficacy (a belief in one’s capabilities). These levels of self-efficacy frequently decline as pre-service teachers progress through their curriculum and make...

Open-ended admission policies to professional education programs, and particularly the admission of candidates with certain types of disabilities, have profound implications for teacher-education programs. Such policies and practices affect the entire educational community, including faculty members, university and faculty administrators, school partners, and pre-service teacher-education candi...

Training pre-service teachers requires, among other things, content knowledge, pedagogical skills and pedagogical content knowledge. Teacher preparation programs have little, if any spare time to add more courses/activities to their program. However, I argue in this paper that we, as educators, must enhance the amount of physics education research in our pre-service physics teacher training pro...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the integration of a cognitive apprenticeship model into an educational technology Web-based course for pre-service primary through secondary teacher education. Specifically, this study presents an overview of methods, tools and media used to foster the integration of a cognitive apprenticeship model, and presents the types of barriers and enablers en...

Service-learning projects are becoming more prevalent in Information Systems education. This study explores the benefits and challenges of community-based research, a special kind of a service-learning strategy, in an Information Systems core course on web development. The paper presents a case study of a service-learning project to develop an educational web portal for a second-grade class by ...

A growing body of research about personal epistemological beliefs has provided tertiary educators with evidence to inform strategies in promoting eff ective teaching and learning. Personal epistemological beliefs refer to an individual’s beliefs about the nature of knowing and knowledge and are considered to infl uence how one engages in teaching and learning experiences. Th ere has been very l...

This paper addresses the question of how teachers learn from experience during their pre-service course and early years of teaching. It outlines a theoretical framework that may help us better understand how teachers’ professional identities emerge in practice. The framework adapts Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, and Valsiner’s Zone of Free Movement and Zone of Promoted Action, to the ...