The practicum experience described here offers the physical education major an opportunity to experience the secondary school and its students while learning the various tasks and rules of teaching. (MM)

The author describes a teaching model designed to enable the methods teacher to exemplify the behavior of a successful teacher. (MM)

"Creativity training may be included as a portion of an existing elementary methods course and effect gratifying creativity improvement with no loss in subject-matter achievement." The possibility that "the creativity-trained person becomes more creative because he values creativity more" suggests a modification of Guilford's Structure of…

The advantages of methods courses to music teachers are presented. (CK)

Educational research as an academic field can be understood as a network or group of networks and, therefore, to consist of interconnected nodes that structure the way the field operates and understands its purpose. This paper deals with the nature of the induction of postgraduate students into the network of educational research that takes place…

Contemporary undergraduate courses in research methods are challenging to teach because of the wide scope of the subject matter, limited student contact hours and the complexity of supervising research projects undertaken by novices. Focus group assignments within class offer an interesting and enjoyable way for students to develop and apply…

Pre-service teachers from Texas and Indiana in the United States and from Queensland, Australia, observed the Moon for a semester and compared and contrasted their findings in asynchronous Internet discussion groups. The 188 pre-service teachers were required to conduct inquiry investigations for their methods coursework which included an initial…

Researchers have been documenting the unfortunate status of social studies in the elementary classroom since the 1980s (J. Stark 1987), and although a lack of teacher interest, poor instructional methods, and the No Child Left Behind Act may be the current contributing factors, these factors should be viewed as just the tip of the iceberg. The…

Studies suggest that student attendance in college classes increases course success. Yet, surprisingly few studies have examined strategies to increase student attendance. The goal of the current study is to consider whether contacting consistently absent students increases success in an undergraduate research methods course. Results of this…

Given that teachers need to present information in a concise, understandable way, to reflect on their practices to inform future actions, and to know how to create and use a teaching artifact, this article reports the findings from a study conducted to examine the impacts from a class-based poster session in teacher education. First, a review of…

This study examines the use of wireless laptop technology to support the application of problem-based learning (PBL) in a special education methods course. This field based course used a progressive disclosure process in weekly seminars to address issues posed in a case study. Eight scenarios, all related to the case, were presented to upper level…

Curriculum materials are a crucial tool with which teachers engage in teaching practice. For preservice teachers to learn to use science curriculum materials in productive ways, they must develop a conception of themselves as elementary teachers in which the use of science curriculum materials is a valued dimension of science-teaching practice. We…