Studying Teacher Education (Executive Summary)

This landmark volume presents the work of the American Educational Research Association's Panel on Research and Teacher Education. It represents a systematic effort to apply a common set of scholarly lenses to a range of important topics in teacher education. The Panel's charge was twofold: to create for the larger educational research community a thorough, rigorous, and even-handed analysis of the empirical research evidence relevant to major policies and practices in pre-service teacher education in the U.S., and to propose a research agenda related to teacher education that builds on what is already known and that identifies the research directions that are most promising for the future. Members of the Panel were appointed from various sectors of the educational research community and with different areas of expertise, including teacher education, policy, assessment, research design and methods, liberal arts, multicultural education, and school reform. Building on their diverse perspectives, they ably translated their charge into a series of questions that became the framework for this volume. The questions illuminate many of the issues that have been most contested in past and current discourse about teacher education reform. Studying Teacher Education examines research about the current pool of prospective and entering teachers and about local, institutional, state, and federal preservice teacher education policies and practices. The book includes three general chapters and nine research syntheses. The AERA Panel on Research and Teacher Education: Context and Goals; Researching Teacher Education in Changing Times: Politics and Paradigms; Teacher Characteristics: Research on the Demographic Profile; Teacher Characteristics: Research on the Indicators of Quality; Research on the Effects of Coursework in the Arts and Sciences and in the Foundations of Education; Research on Methods Courses and Field Experiences; Research on Pedagogical Approaches in Teacher Education; Research on Preparing Teachers for Diverse Populations; Research on Preparing Teachers to Work with Students with Disabilities; Research on Accountability Processes in Teacher Education; Research on Teacher Education Programs; A Research Agenda for Teacher Education; Each chapter reviews the empirical literature and proposes a research agenda that builds on and extends what is known about a topic. A chart at the end of each chapter provides summary information for each of the empirical studies synthesized and two reference lists--one for all of the studies reviewed in the chapter and one for additional references used. The volume includes an introductory chapter on the Panel's context and goals, and an accessible Executive Summary of the book as a whole.