Eighty-three teachers across the curriculum were interviewed to explain their views on and approaches to, the teaching of socio-scientific controversial issues to 14-19 year olds, particularly with regard to developments in biomedicine and biotechnology. This study focused on teachers' views on the nature of evidence in controversial issues and…

The primary objective of this research was to establish a link between preservice, secondary chemistry teachers' knowledge base and beliefs about teaching. The case study followed two preservice chemistry teachers through their methods course, practicum experience, and student teaching internship. Pedagogical content knowledge vignettes, following…

We describe an urban school initiative aimed at teachers' professional development with the goal of increasing their mathematics content knowledge and helping them improve their practice. In the lowest performing schools, mathematics specialists were employed to teach only mathematics in upper-elementary grades (ages 9-12). One aspect of this…

In higher education, approaches to teaching are becoming more student-centred, which demands different teaching competencies. Therefore, it is necessary to have an adequate framework of teaching competencies that can be used for evaluation purposes. The weaknesses of the existing frameworks are that they do not pay attention to the person as…

Curriculum materials for Grades K-12 that are intended to promote teacher learning in addition to student learning have come to be called "educative curriculum materials." How can K-12 curriculum materials be designed to best promote teacher learning? What might teacher learning with educative curriculum materials look like? The authors…

Today, forums constitute an integral part of almost all online courses in teacher education colleges. In many of these courses the forum serves for sharing opinions, attitudes, and feelings by the learners rather than for scaffolding cognitive processes. The forum in the "Human Biology and Health" course for prospective elementary-school science…

Digital libraries are changing the way academic disciplines within universities are conceptualized. The nation's scholars are investing their careers and millions of dollars to use technology to rethink the nature of their disciplines. These advances are affecting academic research and instruction as academic disciplines restructure in response to…

Education is working with language. As teacher educators, this is the authors' main theory. They present one way of working with language through language-games. The article is constructed in three sections. The first part presents the method, stating what concepts are essential in order to understand both this way of working with student teachers…

Distance education is often used as a cost-efficient way to train employees. This research focuses on training for teaching online. A comprehensive literature review revealed the scarcity of scholarly work in this area. To determine best practices in training for teaching online, a faculty training program was examined and experts were…

There are many factors that affect the design of effective professional development (PD) programs. This review of literature focuses on some of the theoretical models used to explain teacher change, the contextual factors that impact teacher behaviors and curricular change, and the role of continuous professional development in changing teaching…

As a result of the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, school systems are required to provide a free and appropriate education for all children with disabilities. This legislation was further supported by The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA), which guarantees all students with…

This submission contains the Proceedings of the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Mathematics Education Study Group (CMESG), held at the Universite de Sherbrooke in Sherbrooke, Quebec. The CMESG is a group of mathematicians and mathematics educators who meet annually to discuss mathematics education issues at all levels of learning. The aims of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to critically examine an assessment task, undertaken by pre-service science teachers, that integrates the use of technology (in this case digital video-recorders and video-editing software) whilst scaffolding skill development. The embedding of technology into the assessment task is purposeful, aiming to…

The number of students taking online courses in K-12 has increased exponentially since the inception of virtual schools in 1996. However, K-12 virtual schooling is a relatively new concept for those involved in teacher education. As teacher education departments build pre-service preparation programs, in-service professional development…

This paper reports on a study conducted on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2005 database. The purpose of the study was to examine predictors of student achievement using middle school mathematics teacher professional development items as criterion variables, such as the number of mathematics courses taken, the number of…