Many variables influence the success of a teacher candidate in a certification program. Using Duckworth's "12-Item Grit Scale," this study sought to explore the relationship between the grittiness of teacher candidates and their dispositions, both prior to and during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although based on a small…

The teaching of ethics in teacher education programs is crucial for fostering the moral and ethical development of prospective teachers and shaping them into ethical role models for future students. This study, employing qualitative case study research, gathered data from undergraduates in teacher education programs to explore the best approaches…

Pre-service teachers' mental models of the nature of soil were investigated in a sample of 181 students from four different Spanish universities, using three different methodological approaches: a phenomenographic analysis of definitions, a categorisation of labelled-drawings and the analysis of answers to a questionnaire consisting of both open-…

Modeling is a key scientific practice and is usually computer-implemented, but it is challenging to teach because it seems high on presuppositions, for example, coding. This design-based research study presents a geography course offered during the 2019/20 winter semester in computer modeling, with no prior coding knowledge. It was implemented in…

Development of professional competencies is a key outcome of undergraduate programs preparing practitioners to work with infants and toddlers. Competencies for working with young children were examined among 1300 undergraduate students at 12 universities. Students completed a series of online questionnaires indicating their knowledge, beliefs, and…

Program evaluation frameworks that assess organizations as complex adaptive systems can open our eyes to new approaches and understandings. The proposed iterative and adaptive developmental program evaluation framework interrelates developmental evaluation principles with adaptive action approaches. We explain and demonstrate the framework with a…

An alternative to insert history of science (HS) in teacher formation programs is the use of concept maps (CM), which may be very useful to represent the historical elaboration dimension of science concepts, laws, and principles. This paper presents the results of a study that identifies the conceptions of pre-service physics teachers about the…

This study explores preservice education student perceptions on ChatGPT's ability to write lesson plans through the use of a guided analysis process with 59 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in STEM, TESOL, and Social studies methods courses for grades PreK-12. A pre- post-survey and a reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of…

To investigate how prompts shape preservice teachers' reflections, we examined, in this exploratory case study, the written reflections responding to three types of prompts (standard-based, concept-based, and task-based) of 21 preservice teachers in an online technology integration class. We analyzed these reflections at the sentence level (total…

In preparing undergraduates to become teachers, initial teacher education (ITE) institutions enter into partnerships with schools, a necessary but often ambiguous undertaking. Alignment or misalignment of the key roles and responsibilities of each stakeholder influences pre-service teachers' experience of teaching practice. The overarching…

Background: Training both pre - and in-service teachers who are capable of planning and enacting engineering design-based science instruction are critical for integrating engineering into K-12 science curricula. Purpose: This study investigates pre-service teachers' efforts to integrate engineering into their lesson plans. Sample: 13 pre-service…

Productive classroom discussion has been shown to support student learning across academic domains. Facilitating successful discussion hinges on the teacher's ability to make adept in-the-moment observations of various aspects of student talk and classroom dynamics. In two studies, we explore a pedagogical intervention using contrasting cases to…

Many novice teachers learn to teach "on the job," leading to burnout and attrition among teachers and negative outcomes for students in the long term. Preservice teacher education is tasked with optimizing teacher readiness, but there is a lack of causal evidence regarding effective ways to prepare new teachers. In this paper, we use a…

This study aimed to address the gap in an environmental science undergraduate course by investigating the impact of explicitly integrating the Nature of Science (NOS) into the instruction of scientific inquiry. The lab-based course focused on developing an understanding of the natural world, as well as the processes scientists use to study that…

This study investigated the impact of a course-based community asset mapping (CAM) project on undergraduate students' capacity for identifying and understanding assets within communities surrounding specific schools. The mapping project was grounded in the literature on culturally sustaining pedagogy and experiential education and involved teacher…