In an efort to understand why recent initiatives to promote learnercentred pedagogy in science teaching made a little change in the actual teaching practices of science teachers, this study explored pre-service science teachers’ beliefs about science knowledge and their teaching practices. Six pre-service science teachers were interviewed to explore their beliefs. Moreover, lessons taught by pr...

Since mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, have become ubiquitous in our daily lives, their use in the modern public classrooms is an ever increasing occurrence. In order to meet the demands of the rising technology needs, teachers must be well versed in the pedagogical and curriculum uses of mobile devices. However, general and special education pre-service teacher education progra...

Training pre-service teachers requires, among other things, content knowledge, pedagogical skills and pedagogical content knowledge. Teacher preparation programs have little, if any spare time to add more courses/activities to their program. However, I argue in this paper that we, as educators, must enhance the amount of physics education research in our pre-service physics teacher training pro...

The ability to create and read different kinds of media products is seen as an important skill for citizenship. In Finland media education (in communicational education) has been taken into the official curriculum as a cross-curriculum subject in 1994 at the primary school level, after the first finnish dissortation in media education had been published (Härkönen 1994). At the same time finnish...

Background: Given the growing interest in, and relevance of, integrated approaches to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education, there is an urgent desire to understand the challenges and obstacles to developing and implementing integrated STEM curricula and instruction. In this article, we present phase 1 of a two-phase needs assessment study to identify challenges and...

ABSTRACT The rural special education context is unique because of the distinct environment and the variety of rural school subcultures. However, little information about rural special education is available prior to the late 1970's, partially because federal agencies lacked a working definition of "rural._" Although rural and urban special education service environments vary greatly (especially...

The present study, following Vygotskyan Sociocultural theory in education, and inspired by Rogoff’s conceptualization (1995, 2003) of development, aimed at conceptual development of  in-service EFL teachers. To this end, two Iranian EFL teachers with pseudonyms (Tara and Sara) were selected as participants of the study. The participating teachers were first taught the sociocultural c...

In physics teacher education the challenge is to promote the development of expertise needed from physics teachers. In that close collaboration between physicist and physics education professionals is needed. This, however, poses many challenges, which are not easily met. We describe here some guidelines, based on our own experience from a pilot course for pre-service physics teacher education....