Background: Recently in education, the idea of promoting student ownership has emerged as a means of authentically engaging students in their own learning. Providing them with ownership over their experiences can lead to students making a greater connection with what they are learning. In teacher education, student ownership takes the form of…

The purpose of this study was to identify and describe factors that influence senior agricultural education students' choice to become a secondary agricultural education teacher. The study focused on the extent to which students' beliefs and attitude about teaching influenced their intent to select teaching secondary agricultural education as a…

In this article, I present my experience with integrating an alternate reality gaming (ARG) framework into a pre-service science teacher education course. My goal is to provide an account of my experiences that can inform other science education practitioners at the tertiary and secondary levels that wish to adopt a similar approach in their…

Teacher educators have the task of identifying skills most needed by pre-service teachers and in-service teachers. The purpose of this study was to describe teacher concerns over different stages of teacher development. A three-part instrument consisting of a teacher concerns statement, a Likert-type scale of concerns and demographic data was…

College readiness, operationally defined by David Conley (2007), one of the contemporary "thought leaders" in the measurement of college readiness, as "the level of preparation a student needs in order to enroll and succeed--without remediation--in a credit-bearing general education course at a postsecondary institution that offers a baccalaureate…

For decades, music teachers have shared the dread of writing formal lesson plans, yet most know that planning yields better instruction. Why does this disconnect continue? The common argument that music teachers make is that teaching music is fundamentally different from teaching other subjects. Lesson plans are written to pacify supervisors and…

As we embark upon the 21st century, the world is becoming increasingly interconnected. Yet, despite increasing globalization, educational systems are not reflecting this phenomenon. The overwhelming majority of countries, including the United States, still emphasize nationalistic curricula (Parker, 2008; Tye, 2009). Global education is a movement…

University mathematics education courses do not always provide the opportunity to make connections between advanced topics and the mathematics taught in middle school or high school. Activities like the ones described in this article invite such connections. Analyzing concrete or particular examples provides a better grasp of abstract concepts.…

The examination of gender roles and stereotypes and their subsequent impact on sexual behavior is a concept for discussion in many sex education courses in college and sex education units in high school. This analysis often leads to a discussion of the impact of nature vs. nurture on gender roles. The gender roles scavenger hunt is an interactive…

Researchers conducted a mixed-methods study with 21 undergraduate university students majoring in education to determine their ability to recognize the motivational factors and 21st-century learning skills associated with digital games. Results suggest that students in the study were able to detect the learning skills embedded in games. The…

In this article, we propose that one way of engaging pre-service and practicing high school Social Studies and English teachers in critical conversations about social class is through the use of life-based literary narratives. By expanding upon Phillion and He's (2004) work around the pedagogical and curricular potential of using life-based…

This study combined traditional classroom teaching methods and blogs with blended creative teaching as a new teaching method for the course "Design and Applications of Teaching Aids for Young Children." It aimed to improve the shortcomings of the traditional teaching approach by incorporating the "Asking, Thinking, Doing, and…

The study explored the influence of university-based teacher education courses on pre-service middle and high school teachers' experiences with multicultural themes in a secondary science alternative certification program. Eight participants (N = 8), six women and two men, volunteered to be a part of the study that took place over a period of four…

The history between Cheektowaga Central and the University at Buffalo illustrates the benefits of forming long-term collaborative relationships between teacher education programs and local schools. In 1998, the author was approached by Suzanne Miller regarding the possibility of Meg Callahan, then a doctoral student at the University at Buffalo,…

During the past few years the authors have developed a new approach to the teaching of physical science, a general education course typically found in the curricula of nearly every college and university. This approach, called "Physics in Films" (Efthimiou and Llewellyn 2006 Phys. Teach. 44 28-33), uses scenes from popular films to illustrate…