This article seeks to understand how teacher preparation makes a difference in classroom instructional quality that leads to student learning. It reviews the research that has been conducted on the fundamental practices of teacher education and how they affect student learning. It shows repeatedly that the link between teacher education programs, effective teachers, and student learning is missing in research on teacher education. The article indicates the complicating factors of making causal connections between teacher education and student learning. It also focuses on research that attempts to link program characteristics to student learning.

The goal of this study was to explore teachers’ beliefs about students in the United States and if these beliefs evolve during the first five years of teaching. Findings from the present study indicate that teachers’ beliefs about students are positive and adaptive and become more cohesive and positive during the first five years of teaching, despite the challenges typically encountered by beginning teachers.

This article examines the way the teacher candidates used their understandings of their roles and relationships to construct instances of success. These participants had the same content major, took the same teaching coursework, and had the same programmatic expectations for student teaching. Both deemed their student teaching internship as a successful learning experience, and they received a passing grade. However, the two teacher candidates differed in the ways which they made meaning of everyday events and relationships. One of the participants defined success through the feedback from her cooperating teachers and university supervisors, whereas the other participant drew upon her own internal beliefs.

This study explored the change in university students’ beliefs about the role of teachers. The findings reveal that the most commonly-used metaphor type was the teacher as pedagogue, reflecting the idea of the teacher as a nurturer. The students showed tendencies in their preferences for forms of expertise in the teacher’s knowledge-base measure similar to the categorisation of their metaphors. Another interesting trend is the relatively high emphasis on didactics on the knowledge-base measure by the users of self-referential and contextual metaphors in both years. Furthermore, beliefs as measured on the knowledge-base instrument tended to remain unchanged. Metaphor categorisation may be more vulnerable to subjective interpretation.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of a required assessment course on the assessment literacy of teacher candidates. The findings showed that certain aspects of assessment literacy were present before the course. At the onset of the course, teacher candidates had the highest mean scores for Ethical Assessment, Scoring, and Choosing Assessment Methods. However, the exposure to the course potentially increased assessment literacy in some areas. For instance, the participants came into the course with low mean scores in sound design of assessments and communicating results. The results revealed that the participants increased in their mean scores for sound design of assessment and communicating results on the posttest, though these were still the lowest scores.

This article describes an online tutoring system that was used to give preservice teachers an opportunity to analyze and remediate student work. Through a careful analysis and rich discussion about different suggested remediation strategies, preservice teachers were exposed to a variety of techniques that could be used to help correct student errors. The author argues that this online error analysis items challenged preservice teachers to analyze, diagnose, and provide targeted instructional remediation intended to help mock students overcome common error patterns and misconceptions.

This study utilized a comparative case study design to understand preservice teachers’ views on programmatic elements that led to transformative learning experiences in the areas of global and local diversity. The findings reveal that participants in both programs demonstrated a new or enhanced interest in global issues and a more nuanced understanding of themselves as educators, though the relationship between global issues and their identities as culturally competent teachers of diverse students varied between programs. The findings can be grouped into three primary categories: relevant and interactive assignments, hands-on experiences, and support for personal growth.