There has been little attention given to teaching beliefs of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs), even though they represent the primary teaching workforce for undergraduate students in discussion and laboratory sections at many research universities. Secondary school education studies have shown that teaching beliefs are malleable and can be…

Effective use of educational technologies by teachers in classrooms has come into prominence as the integration of technology into educational settings in todays world is considered as an inseparable part of an effective teaching. Besides, recent teacher training curriculums too emphasize the use of teaching strategies including technology to…

The present study focuses on examining how digitally guided conceptual mapping can be used in orienting students in higher education to learn complex domain content and practices. The outcomes of conceptual mapping were investigated as the orienting bases created by the students that used digitalized conceptual tools to construct an external…

Research skills are a valued commodity by industry and university administrators. Despite the importance placed on these skills students typically dislike taking research method courses where these skills are learned. However, training in research skills does not necessarily have to be confined to these courses. In this study participants at a…

What is environment? The answer to this question is fundamental to how we teach environmental studies and sciences (ESS). We follow recent scholarly literature in approaching environment as connection, not as some category of reality, and consider pedagogical implications via concept mapping, a new learning technology. Concept maps potentially…

This article reports the investigation of change in preservice teachers' conceptions of effective history teaching across a secondary history methods course in a postgraduate diploma of education program. Using concept mapping to plot shifts in their expressed reflections, data were obtained that indicate personal constructs of effective history…

One of the core courses in the undergraduate mechanical engineering curriculum has been completely redesigned. In the new numerical methods course, all assignments and learning experiences are built around a video/computer game. Students are given the task of writing computer programs to race a simulated car around a track. In doing so, students…

This article presents data from a group of secondary pre-service teachers who used vee diagrams to illustrate their conceptual and methodological analyses of a problem, as part of a required mathematics methods course assignment. The individually constructed vee diagrams were analysed in terms of the extent to which they displayed principles and…

One of the challenges of teacher education is to train preservice teachers to deliver a wide range of literacy skills to a diverse population. This article describes a mixed methods research study into preservice undergraduate literacy methods courses. This research examined how online, asynchronously conducted discussions influenced and impacted…

This study assessed the influence of training in, and use of, metacognitive strategies on the development of prospective elementary teachers' views of nature of science (NOS). Participants were 49 students (92% female) enrolled in two sections of an elementary science methods course. The sections were randomly assigned to an intervention group and…

In this inquiry, I examine the evidence of student learning in an elementary education language arts methods course. Students completed concepts maps that represented their understanding of effective writing instruction at the beginning end of the course. Eighty-one pairs of concepts maps were scored according to established methods. Students…

This article describes the outcome of an exercise carried out with one hundred undergraduate student teachers (preservice teachers) enrolled in a Biology Teaching Methods course, a third year course in a four-year Teacher Education Programme. The students, working in groups of three to four, were assigned to construct a concept map showing their…