International Portal of Teacher Education
The online resource of academic content on teacher training and teacher education
Section archive - Preservice Teachers
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475 items
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The purpose of this study was to examine the experiences of teacher education students participating in an experiential learning environment designed to support active play opportunities for children.
43 Participants completed a 5-hour recess assistance volunteer activity, thereby leading active play, and were then asked to write about their experiences.
Student journal reflections were examined by researchers and coded in three phases: open, axial, and selective coding.
Findings indicated student teachers perceived three educational and professional development needs to successfully facilitate active play opportunities as future teachers: pedagogical experiences, content-based experiences, and relationship building.
Published: 2019
Updated: Feb. 25, 2020
2
This study examined Hong Kong pre-service early childhood teachers’ attitudes towards different types of parental involvement strategies and investigated whether these attitudes were related to the quality of relationships within their own family.
Data were collected by the authors from 163 Hong Kong pre-service early childhood teachers via questionnaire.
Results showed that engaging families in school decisions was perceived as the least important and feasible.
The pre-service teachers also felt least confident in implementing it.
There were, however, discrepancies in the perceived levels of importance, feasibility and confidence towards other types of parental involvement strategies.
The levels of cohesion and expressiveness in pre-service teachers’ own families were positively related to their attitudes towards some types of parental involvement strategies.
These findings suggest that teacher educators should take pre-service teachers’ family experiences into consideration when preparing them to work with children’s families.
Published: 2019
Updated: Jan. 21, 2020
3
The present study investigates the nature of Iranian student teachers’ reflections and their professional development in the context of teacher education practicums.
The participants were student teachers (N = 41) enrolled in teacher education colleges at Farhangian University in Tehran, Iran.
A total of 620 reflective writing excerpts were coded using deductive content analysis across three cohorts in three different practicums during a two-year period.
The results show that routine levels of reflection significantly decreased across the three practicums, while technical levels of reflection significantly increased.
The higher levels of reflection, namely dialogic and transformative levels, were rarely found in student teachers’ reflective writings across the practicums.
This study discusses the need both to develop appropriate methods to guide student teachers in centralized contexts such as Iran and to investigate further aspects that enhance or hinder progress in the quality of reflection in teacher education.
Published: 2019
Updated: Jan. 12, 2020
4
The authors conducted a cross-sectional questionnaire study in 2016 with 697 student teachers from two Universities.
The study used structural equation modelling to analyse the effects of received social support from family and fellow-students as well as perceived self-efficacy in relation to the basic psychological needs in teacher education.
To measure the effects of received social support on the satisfaction of basic needs, the authors developed two scales adapting Mansfield’s qualitative approach on teacher resilience.
Perceived self-efficacy turned out to be effected directly by received fellow-students’ support as well as having a mediation effect on higher levels of autonomy and competence, whereas received family support leads only to higher levels of autonomy.
Especially received fellow-students’ support is directly connected to higher levels of need satisfaction.
Finally, the authors discuss conclusions for shaping conditions of university-life according to experiencing what is necessary for a higher level of perception and satisfaction of basic psychological needs.
Published: 2019
Updated: Dec. 10, 2019
5
University students experience stress, and how they cope with this stress affects their academic achievement.
This study examined stress in teacher education students and had three objectives:
to describe different degrees of stress and coping styles;
to study the relationship between stress, coping strategies and academic achievement;
and to examine whether increased age can moderate the effects of stress on academic achievement in 334 university-students.
There were three main findings: many students experienced stress and used avoidance coping strategies;
the students who were under less stress and engaged less in cognitive avoidance and more in problem-focused coping were also the students who made more academic achievement;
and students under more stress performed worse, but with age stress affected performance less.
In teacher education students, it is important to recognize and address the harmful effects of stress on well-being and academic achievement, to avoid long-term problems in professional and personal life.
Published: 2019
Updated: Dec. 09, 2019
6
This paper reports on an exploratory study designed to determine and enhance the conceptual understanding of a group of pre-service mathematics teachers at one Irish university utilizing an established framework for understanding mathematics.
23 students on a one-year Professional Diploma in Mathematics Education participated in the study, which involved the distribution of a pre- and post-test and engagement in a ten week intervention designed to enhance their subject matter knowledge (SMK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK).
The findings highlight that although there was an improvement in overall conceptual understanding across the entire cohort at the end of the intervention, within certain mathematical topics there was a statistically insignificant improvement and many deep-rooted issues remain. In this paper the authors focus on the pre-service teachers’ understanding of elementary algebra, in particular, how to solve a linear equation.
Published: 2019
Updated: Oct. 23, 2019
7
Results from a metasynthesis of the relationships between 14 different types of preservice teacher preparation practices and teaching quality, preschool to university student performance, and university student and beginning teacher belief appraisals are reported.
Each type of preservice practice (e.g., course-based student learning) included different kinds of instructional methods (e.g., problem-based learning, inquiry-based learning, and project-based learning).
The metasynthesis included 118 meta-analyses and 12 surveys of more than three million study participants.
Findings clearly indicated that active university student and beginning teacher involvement in mastering the use of instructional practices and both knowledge and skill acquisition by far stood out as the most important preservice teacher preparation practices.
The pattern of results helped identify high leverage and high impact teacher preparation practices. Implications for future research and improving teacher preparation are described.
Published: 2019
Updated: Sep. 12, 2019
8
In a mixed-methods longitudinal study, the authors monitored the development of interaction skills among a group of Dutch pre-service teachers with repeated measures for 3 years and structured interviews.
The results of a linear mixed-effects model revealed an impressive growth of interaction skills during the pre-service training.
The qualitative interview data revealed progress of pre-service teachers’ professional reflection on their interaction with young children.
These outcomes show the effectiveness of pre-service training for the development of interaction skills and professional reflection in early childhood education and care.
However, progress is relatively modest for instructional skills and this domain needs further investment in pre-service training.
Published: 2019
Updated: Aug. 11, 2019
9
Preservice teachers in this study (N = 121) received training in evidence-based practices for vocabulary instruction via a series of three training modules. They then completed one of two practice conditions—creating a multimedia product to teach a vocabulary word or completing a non-multimedia learning task during class. The two practice conditions resulted in similar gains on the knowledge measure, but the group that created the multimedia product significantly outperformed the group that completed the non-multimedia task in a demonstration of instruction. Implications for teacher education are discussed by the authors.
Published: 2018
Updated: Jul. 29, 2019
10
This article examines the ways that students recounted personal and professional stories in classroom discussion in relation to their emerging understanding of what it would mean to become a bilingual educator. The authors found that the storied character of teachers’ knowledge building and identity exploration. Through narratives-in-interaction shared in online written discussion, the participants related experiences and described imagined teacher roles as they made sense of bilingual teaching. The findings also demonstrated how narrative-in-interaction functioned as a learning system through which preservice teachers made diverse knowledge sources their own, connecting individual to collective and theoretical to experiential knowledge.
Published: 2016
Updated: Dec. 25, 2018