Section archive - Preservice Teachers

The purpose of this study is to clarify how pre-service teachers perceive mentor teachers’ use of mentoring skills. Sixty stimulated-recall interviews were conducted, each in connection with a previously recorded mentoring dialogue. A quantitative analysis showed that six types of mentoring skills appeared to be perceived by pre-service teachers as offering emotional support and five others as offering task assistance.

The purpose of this article is to describe the authors' iterative design work in teacher education around one authentic scientific practice—namely, the practice of scientific modeling. The authors describe their instructional designs, which they have incorporated into three different teacher education programs, and they present their struggles and successes with the students in these programs, who are tomorrow’s teachers.

The current study examines the self-efficacy of one preservice elementary school teacher during and after her participation in an elementary preservice science methods course. The results of these experiences are studied to determine what changes have taken place in the participants’ self-efficacy in science teaching as well as the one preservice teacher in greater detail.

This article emphasizes features of Internet literacy practices that preservice mathematics and science teachers found compelling and important for their pupils’ learning. 24 mathematics and science preservice teachers (PSTs) conducted a scaffolded investigation into the literacy practices of pupils in their practicum placements. These investigations clearly demonstrated to PSTs that Internet literacies create new demands on comprehension strategies that are in some ways similar to traditional literacies but in many respects go beyond them.