Section archive - Theories & Approaches

This study examines the pervasiveness of late teacher hiring in urban and suburban school districts and explores the association between the timing of teacher hires and teacher qualifications, including certification, master’s degree, and selectivity of undergraduate institution. The results indicate that across the nation, districts hire a large portion of teachers during the second half of summer or once school has already begun. Results indicate no association between the proportion of teachers hired at various time points and the teacher qualifications, including selectivity of teachers’ undergraduate institutions and whether teachers are certified or have master’s degrees.

In this article, the authors conducted an integrative literature review focusing on the methods of argument analysis and assessment that have been proposed thus far in the field of education. Specifically, they constructed an interpretative framework to organize the information contained in 97 reviewed studies in a coherent and meaningful way. The main result of the framework’s application is the emergence of three levels of argumentative competence: metacognitive, metastrategic, and epistemological competence.

Guided in part by social-ecological analysis and social-cultural theory, engagement is conceptualized as a dynamic system of social and psychological constructs as well as a synergistic process. This conceptualization invites researchers, policymakers, and school-community leaders to develop improvement models that provide a more expansive, engagement-focused reach into students’ family, peer, and neighborhood ecologies.

This study examined the experiences of a group of six preservice English language teachers in Hong Kong as they prepared for, engaged in, and reflected upon a compulsory research project during the final year of their Bachelor of Education degree program. The article discusses the experiences of these preservice teachers in terms of the construction of their teacher identities. The findings illustrate the identity conflicts the preservice teachers experienced as their research engagement required that they cross institutional and educational boundaries to confront, question, and reject various identity positions, including ‘student teacher’, ‘full-time teacher’, and ‘teacher-researcher’. The article concludes that the lens of teacher identity can provide insights into how student teachers’ perceptions and experiences of research shape and are shaped by their understandings of themselves as teachers.