In British social science degree programmes, methods courses have a bad press, and statistics courses in particular are not well-liked by most students. A nationally-coordinated, strategic investment in quantitative skills training, Q-Step, is an attempt to address the issues affecting the shortage of quantitatively trained humanities and social…

Lecturing is often criticized for being a monological and student passive way of teaching. However, digital technology such as Student Response Systems (SRS) can be used to reconstruct the traditional lecturing format. During a series of five two-hour lectures in "qualitative methods" for first year psychology students, we used SRS to…

This study assessed the methods of teaching English course taught at the general diploma at the college of Graduate Studies in Education, Cairo University in light of English teachers' needs and expectations. The Methodology course was reconstructed using the premises of students centered teaching techniques and taking into consideration what is…

Teacher self-efficacy is the belief a teacher holds that he or she can make a difference in student achievement, even when the student is difficult or unmotivated (Guskey & Passaro, 1994). It has been linked to positive teacher practices and student outcomes. This mixed methods study of preservice elementary and early childhood math teachers…

As universities seek to bolster enrollment through distance education, faculty are tasked with maintaining comparable teaching/learning standards in traditional, blended, and online courses. Research has shown that there is an achievement gap between students taking courses exclusively offered online versus those enrolled in face-to-face classes.…

Background: Many alternative curricular models exist in physical education to better meet the needs of students than the multi-activity team sports curriculum that dominates in the USA. These alternative curricular models typically require different content knowledge (CK) and pedagogical CK (PCK) to implement successfully. One of the complexities…

Just as the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSSs) call for change in what students learn and how they are taught, teacher education programs must reconsider courses and curriculum in order to prepare teacher candidates to understand and implement new standards. In this study, we examine the development of prospective elementary…

Most teacher educators who work at institutes for higher vocational education have faced a new role since the European Community aimed to upgrade the general quality of education. Research tasks have been added as a new important core business for institutes that used to be mainly focused on education. Teacher educators therefore have to become…

Teacher beliefs have for some time been directly linked to teacher actions. What teachers believe about curriculum, pedagogy, their students, and the greater goals of education itself influences their instructional behaviors and resultant decision-making. This study sought to analyze how experiences influence changes in beliefs, can provide…

Service-learning provides community service as well as authentic, curriculum-driven learning experiences (Furco & Root, 2010) and has been an effective component of teacher education courses (García, Arias, Murri, & Surna, 2010; Mitton-Kukner, Nelson, & Descrochers, 2010; Spencer, Cox-Petersen, & Crawford, 2005). With these…

This article reports on a semester-long project where a TESOL professor and English Education professor modeled collaborative teaching and explicitly taught collaboration skills to a coscheduled teaching methods class consisting of TESOL and Secondary English teacher candidates. Data were collected in the form of pre- and postsemester surveys. In…

In order to help children gain a more robust understanding of place value, teachers must understand the connections and relationships among the related concepts as well as possess knowledge of how children learn early number concepts. Unfortunately, teachers' familiarity with the base-ten number system and/or lack of an understanding of…

According to a recent report, by the year 2020, more than 50% of the U.S. public school population will be classified as persons of color; that is, students from African, African-American, American Indian, Latino, and Pacific Islander backgrounds (Aud, Fox, & KewalRamani, 2010). As a result of these changing demographics, it is essential for…

This article investigates the use of photography as a narrative approach to learning in the context of postsecondary education. Two cases are presented: a social studies methods course in a teacher education program in the South of the United States; and a senior undergraduate seminar on global violence at a university in southern Ontario, Canada.…

In this study, I, the first author as a Thai teacher educator employed self-study as a research methodology to investigate my own understandings, questions, and curiosities about pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for teaching science student teachers and the ways I engaged student teachers in a field-based science methods course designed to help…