Assessing Beliefs of Preservice Early Childhood Education Teachers Using Q-Sort Methodology

Assessing Parental Beliefs in Early Childhood

Assessing parental beliefs in early childhood is significant because of its ability to properly understand parenting as an adaptational process along with child development. Sigel and McGillicuddy-De Lisi (2002) stated, “What parents believe about parenting is related to their own parenting and to virtually every aspect of children’s developmental accomplishments.” The purpose of this study is ...

Preservice Teachers’ Metaphors of Teaching in Relation to Literacy Beliefs

The purpose of this study was to examine preservice elementary and secondary English and foreign language teachers’ metaphors and relate their metaphorical images to conceptions of literacy. Specifically, sixty-six participants completed a questionnaire that solicited their sense of teaching. Results indicated that the preservice teachers’ beliefs could be categorized into nine themes. The most...

How Teacher Educators’ Beliefs and Technology Uses Relate to Preservice Teachers’ Beliefs and Attitudes toward Technology

Beliefs about teaching and learning play an important role in transforming classrooms through the use of technology (Ertmer, 1999, 2005). Additionally, attitudes toward technology can influence teachers’ technology uses (Myers & Halpin, 2002; Yildirim, 2000). In order to prepare preservice teachers to use technology effectively, it is necessary to examine their beliefs about learning and teachi...

Teachers as Designers: Integrating Robotics in Early Childhood Education

This article presents a constructionist approach to introducing technology, in particular robotics, in the early childhood classroom. The authors demonstrate how this approach is well suited, since the four basic tenets of constructionism have a long-standing tradition in early childhood education: (a) learning by designing meaningful projects to share in the community, (b) using concrete objec...

Children's knowledge, teachers' knowledge: Implications for early childhood teacher education