The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) mandates that every classroom be staffed with a "highly qualified teacher." Research supports that teachers' content knowledge affects student achievement. However, the special education population continues to be taught by teachers who do not have the content area background they teach. In addition,…

Dealing with ethnic and linguistic diversity is one of the major challenges in today's education. Therefore, the formulation of competencies for teachers and teacher training should take into account the specific requirements of teaching in multicultural schools. In 2002, a series of small-scale studies were conducted to identify and formulate…

As a facilitator of professional development for preschool teachers, the author is continually faced with questions related to the great divide between theory and practice. Although most child care professionals learn that developmentally appropriate practices support the holistic growth of young children during their initial training, many…

Over the past thirty years, numerous studies confirmed that new teachers do not have the requisite knowledge to understand the complex interrelationships among management, behavior, and academic tasks. An important missing piece in the literature is how the concerns of experienced teachers differ from those cited by beginning teachers. Based on…

In spite of repeated reform efforts, there is research and data that suggest that teachers lack the needed knowledge to successfully teach elementary mathematics. Some argue that teachers lack the needed content knowledge while other argue that a lack of confidence and practice are impacting teachers' ability to successful teach mathematics. As a…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to determine agricultural science teacher comfort with a new high school Advanced Life Science: Animal course and determine their perceptions of student impact. The advanced science course is eligible for college credit. The teachers revealed they felt confident of their science background in preparation…

Within the past 20 years, the arts have gained increasing prominence in educational discourses as well as public arenas. At the same time that traditional genres of art (e.g., music, visual art, and performance) are being taught as part of school curricula, the study of the arts in education has taken on new venues in supporting learning and…

The author conducted research in Jordan, where he interviewed secondary school social studies teachers about their perspectives on teaching critical-thinking skills in their classrooms. All interviews were audiotaped or videotaped in Arabic and later translated into English. The author qualitatively analyzed data, including the translations of the…

In 1989, the delegate assembly of the Council for Exceptional Children began the process of developing standards of knowledge and skills for all beginning teachers of special education, including teachers of children who are deaf or hard of hearing. Now in its third major revision, these standards provide guidance to states' departments of…

The Science Belief Test is an online instrument comprised of 47 statements that require true or false responses and request written explanations to accompany these responses. It targets topics in chemistry, physics, biology, earth science, and astronomy and was initially designed to assess preservice elementary teachers' beliefs about general…

Decisions by markers about quality in student work remain confusing to most students and markers. This may in part be due to the relatively subjective nature of what constitutes a quality response to an assessment task. This paper reports on an experiment that documented the process of decision-making by multiple markers at a university who…

Concerns about the importance of variation in statistics education and a lack of research in this topic led to a preliminary study which explored pre-service teachers' ideas in this area. The teachers completed a written questionnaire about variation in sampling and distribution contexts. Responses were categorised in relation to a framework that…

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) 2007 Call for Proposals points out the need for researchers in education to look beyond their usual sources to other fields that have extensive experience in relevant theories and methods. In transitioning from a response to AERA's Call for Proposals to the text of these articles on Assessing…

At the core of the argument-based approach to test validation as it has been presented by Kane (1992, 2004, 2006) is a relatively simple premise: test validity is demonstrated by linking the score that is observed from a test instrument to the use of that score for some subsequent inference. Details, however, are not so simple: How does one craft…

It is well established that teacher quality is one of the most significant school influences on student achievement. Unfortunately, it is less clear how teacher preparation programs can prepare and recruit effective educators for every classroom. As the global economy demands that all students are college and career ready after high school,…