Preservice teachers' prior knowledge about teaching and learning may di!er substantially from the theories and ideas presented in their education courses. In the present study, a refutational (conceptual change) text on motivation was used in an e!ort to address preservice teachers' conceptions of motivation. Results indicated that preservice teachers who read the refutational text performed si...

ion Step two is for each student teacher, individually, to produce their own representation of their conception of mathematical proof using any or all of the above key terms (or others that they might choose), arranging them on a blank piece of paper from their own perspective, and joining Mathematics Education Review, Volume 9, May 1997 pp21-32 27 key terms in what they consider a meaningful w...

Combining face-to-face learning and teaching experiences with online tasks and activities has become an increasingly common practice for a growing number of university teachers. This phenomenon, known as ‘blended’ learning, has become part of the educational provision of most ‘conventional’ on-campus universities. The present study investigated how conceptions of teaching and eTeaching, both si...

This study presents comparative case studies of preservice and first-year teachers’ and expert teachers’ conceptions of the concept of prior knowledge. Kelly’s (The Psychology of Personal Construct, New York: W.W. Norton, 1955) theory of personal constructs as discussed by Akerson, Flick, and Lederman (Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 2000, 37, 363–385) in relationship to prior knowledg...

BACKGROUND Despite increasing interest in teachers' and students' conceptions of learning and teaching, and how they influence their practice, there are few studies testing the influence of teachers' conceptions on their students' learning. AIMS This study tests how teaching conception (TC; with a distinction between direct and constructive) influences students' representations regarding shee...

This research focused on the interactionist conceptual ecologies of inservice teachers and how these ecologies influenced these teachers’ conceptual frameworks for the nature of science (NOS). The participants in the study were five teachers enrolled in a graduate course focused on NOS. Data included participants’ responses to open-ended and Likert scale surveys, interviews, writing prompts, an...

The present study reports the use of an interview task to identify the initial conceptions of engineering and teaching engineering held by secondary mathematics and science teachers upon entering a professional development program. Results obtained from this task gave insight on several points, including: (1) the requirements for a task to be considered engineering; (2) the role of a student in...