The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between university supervisors’ predictions and teacher candidates’ performance on a summative assessment based on a capstone teaching event, part of the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT). The findings indicate that university supervisors’ perspectives about their candidates did not always correspond with outcomes on the PACT teaching event, a summative performance assessment. In addition, most of the candidates with the highest and lowest scores on the assessment were not those for whom the supervisors anticipated outstanding or poor performance.

Teacher education in Norway is nationally regulated and is currently undergoing extensive changes. The authors outline the various education routes for teachers and some of the ongoing work to improve teacher education. The authors focus on the reform that has come the farthest: initial teacher education for grades 1–7 and grades 5–10. The authors discuss the controversies abound in teacher education, and the relationship between designing programmes that enable the development of skills and also enhance becoming a teacher..

This article reports on an interview study that explored how teacher educators across different disciplines anticipate the work that must be done to produce critical professionals to teach the new Australian curriculum. The authors summarize the differences indicated across the four curriculum areas sampled: English teacher educators seemed mostly concerned about political interference in educational matters; history teacher educators seemed mostly concerned about the status of knowledge in the proposed curriculum; a maths educators had concerns around the rationale for selection of curricular content; and science educators were concerned about personal relevance and the pedagogical implications of over-selection of content.

The authors investigated whether blog reflections would show a greater depth of reflection (DoR( than end-of-the-semester paper reflections. The authors developed a reflection assessment tool, Framework of Four Levels of Reflection for Teacher Education. The results indicated that the preservice teachers who completed blogs showed higher levels of reflection in their writing compared to those who completed papers. Furthermore, the blogs were shorter than the papers. These results indicate that reflections posted to blogs over the course of the semester are more effective than final papers for reflective assignments.

The authors examined the effect of a new academic mentoring program on student academic integration, success and persistence. Specifically, the authors focused on the MIRES program (Mentoring for the Integration and Success of Science Students) aimed at preventing student dropout in math, science and technology. The MIRES program was implemented in two colleges in the Quebec City area. The results showed that participation in the MIRES programs had positive effects on motivation, career decision profile, college adjustment and academic success and persistence of students. The findings also revealed that the MIRES program had a greater impact on the perseverance of male, rather than female students.

This article compares three major movements demanding accountability in American education across: The efficiency reforms of the Progressive Era; The movement toward accountability in the late 1960s and early 1970s; and The modern standards and accountability movement, culminating in No Child Left Behind. This paper considers the three movements as cases of school “rationalization” in the Weberian sense in that each sought to reduce variation and discretion across schools in favor of increasingly formal systems of standardized top-down control.

This study explores opportunities to learn within and across student teaching placements.The authors analyze the degree to which placement experiences present equitable opportunities for PSTs to build a specialized knowledge base. The authors found that all participants repeatedly praised student teaching for nurturing emerging professional identities and conferring new self-confidence. Specifically, the authors address three core strands of opportunity reportedly experienced by participants. These include opportunities to learn about curriculum and content; opportunities to see and participate in, but usually not plan for, “what’s possible”; and opportunities to struggle with and for youth.