Institutions of Higher Education are beginning to place a greater emphasis on quality teaching and student learning. However, few faculty receive any type of teacher training prior to entering the academy. As a result, faculty development is one likely solution to teacher quality issues. But faculty development is faced with serious shortcomings that impede its ability to improve teacher qualit...

Education policymakers have long recognized the importance of having highly effective teachers in all of our nation’s classrooms. Among recent policy efforts, the federal Race to the Top (RTTT) competition and the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers have highlighted the importance of ensuring highly effective instruction as a central policy consideration, primarily through increased attention t...

As robots become more commonplace within society, the need for tools that enable non-robotics-experts to develop control algorithms, or policies, will increase. Learning from Demonstration (LfD) offers one promising approach, where the robot learns a policy from teacher task executions. In this work we present an algorithm that incorporates human teacher feedback to enable policy improvement fr...

Background: This study examined the relationships of various teacher retention factors with the intentions of math and science teachers to remain in the profession. With data collected from the 2007–08 Schools and Staffing Survey, a sample of 6588 secondary math and science teachers across public schools in the USA was used for structural equation modeling. Results: Socioeconomic impact, studen...

Teacher education philosophy plays an important role in enhancing the teachers’ awareness of the practices particularly in the context of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). This study meant to observe the possible effect of the awareness of teacher education philosophy on EFL teachers’ professional skill in the light of Kumaravadivelu’s postmethod parameters, tapping teachers’ gender, academi...

Improvement in the quality of teacher education programs, especially in higher education, is an important issue. Failure to have an efficient teacher education program could lead to the training of graduates who are not prepared for the realities of the classroom. Accordingly, in an attempt to help improve the present situa- tion of teacher education programs especially at the graduate le...

This paper describes a model for generating and accumulating knowledge for both teaching and teacher education. The model is applied first to prepare prospective teachers to learn to teach mathematics when they enter the classroom. The concept of treating lessons as experiments is used to explicate the intentional, rigorous, and systematic process of learning to teach through studying one’s own...

Research on teachers’ (personal) theories and beliefs and their (practical) knowledge derived from experience, whether held implicitly or stated explicitly as their personal practical theories (PPTs), indicates that such beliefs can influence teachers’ classroom practices and, therefore, the opportunities that their students have for learning. This study uses a content analysis of 472 self-repo...

Lost in Translation? Teacher Training and Outcomes in High School Economics Classes Using data on 24 teachers and 982 students from a 2006 survey of California high school economics classes, we assess the effects of student and teacher characteristics on student achievement. We estimate value-added models of outcomes on multiple choice and essay exams, with matched classroom pairs for each teac...

This study used reflective practitioner methodology to investigate how to improve the quality of statistical education. During the study, this methodology, curricula, pedagogical practices, assessment and a framework for learning to learn statistics were all developed as means of improving the quality of statistical education. Also documented was the move from being a classroom teacher of stati...