The paper is devoted to the review of our research with respect to the Polish special education student teachers' readiness to work with gifted and talented children. The research covered not only special education students but also their peers who represented other pedagogical specialisations. The purpose of our study was to evaluate the level of…

In this paper we argue that special educators have a critical role to play in supporting children from diverse communities at times of vulnerability, which are created by the distance between the demands of the school context and the child's cultural context, and that increase the likelihood for school failure and for referral for or placement in…

This article describes the goals of a capstone course for secondary preservice mathematics teachers and how those goals are achieved. Moreover, student reaction to the course will be examined.

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships among the components of preservice science teachers' (PSTs) pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) involving the topic "ozone layer depletion". An open-ended survey was first administered to 216 PSTs in their final year at the Faculty of Education to determine their subject matter…

Video cases are becoming more and more prevalent throughout the United States to assist in the development and growth of preservice teachers' instruction. This research investigates the perspectives of preservice teachers and their naive understandings of the kinds of learning and assistance video cases can provide in their methodology courses.…

To understand how teacher education might build the knowledge it needs, the editors of this issue investigate how organizations outside of education create and maintain "self-improving" systems that enable them to learn how to get better at what they do. To learn about knowledge building in teacher education, the research reported here also looks…

Pedagogical content knowledge is found to be a crucial part of the knowledge base for teaching. Studies in the field of primary technology education showed that this domain of teacher knowledge is related to pupils' increased learning, motivation, and interest. The common methods to investigate teachers' pedagogical content knowledge are often…

Teachers of students with visual impairments and paraeducators who work with students with visual impairments were surveyed to determine if previous research related to the competencies needed by teachers who supervise paraeducators applied to this subset of special educators. Both groups confirmed the importance of the competencies, but…

A professional development programme for music educators was designed and administered to include institutional and personal professional strategies for the enhancement and growth of music teachers' knowledge base and actions. Supervisors and targeted practitioners in a large public school system built an innovative programme, applying current…

Over the past several decades, the changing face of America and the diversification of its schools have been catalysts for a strong movement among music educators to promote the adoption of a more global perspective in the music classroom. Educators are encouraged to integrate into their curricula a varied repertoire representing musical cultures…

Recent studies of elementary teachers' knowledge about reading have been built on the premise that teachers need thorough knowledge about language and reading processes, but these studies have provided only limited evidence that teachers' performance on tests of such knowledge contributes to their students' reading achievement. The present study…

Effective teaching skills consist of high levels of student engagement based on good classroom and time management skills; the ability to scaffold learning that is adapted to students' current levels of understanding; cognitively engaging students in higher-order thinking; and encouraging and supporting success. The research reported here suggests…

The author expresses concern that love of knowledge, which he views as the most valuable resource in universities, is not taken seriously by the academic press. This article considers what is to be done about it; and discusses how collegiality, based upon a celebration of intellectual love, might restore, or create, integrity within the academic…

The authors provide a review and critique of 82 empirical investigations conducted in the United States on teacher preparation for reading instruction. These studies were chosen from a pool of 298 based on the authors' coding of research quality indicators. Applying an inductive paradigmatic analysis of the 82 studies, this review suggests that in…

This article describes a study in which measures of mathematical knowledge for teaching developed in the United States were adapted to measure mathematical knowledge for teaching in Ireland. When adapting the measures it was not assumed that the mathematical knowledge used by Irish and U.S. teachers is the same. Instead psychometric and…