The goal of this study is two-fold: 1) to examine the role content knowledge plays in prospective teachers’ (PSTs) ability to recognize children’s conceptual understanding of mathematics, and, 2) to examine examined PSTs' ability to recognize evidence of children’s conceptual understanding of mathematics in three content areas before and after an instructional intervention designed to support this ability. The results of this study suggest that content knowledge is necessary but insufficient in supporting PSTs’ ability to recognize evidence of children’s conceptual understanding of mathematics.

In this article, the authors focused on findings from qualitative research on the effects of action research by reporting two linked quantitative studies. The authors' first goal was to triangulate the findings from their quantitative inquiry with the results from qualitative studies in order to increase the generalizability of claims previously reported. Their second goal was to identify potential moderators of action research impact on teachers. The contribution of these two studies to the corpus of action research literature is twofold. First, the authors confirmed two important benefits of action research participation reported by qualitative researchers, improved teacher attitudes to educational research and increased self-efficacy. Second, they found moderators of the impact of action research that help identify conditions in which action research is particularly likely to benefit teachers.

The work of this study examines the process of interacting with materials and students while thinking about teaching in order to guide curriculum material designers’ thinking about when and how materials might be helpful for teachers. The study followed a seventh-grade science teacher, who enacted five inquiry-based science units with all 5 of her seventh-grade science classes over a 2-year period. The findings describe the teacher’s interactions with materials written to support teachers learning to teach inquiry science. Findings indicate that this teacher’s ideas developed as she interacted with materials and her students. Information about student ideas, task and idea-specific support, and model teacher language was most helpful.

This study was an exploration of the conceptions of inquiry science held by exemplary elementary teachers. The study explored the ideas, understandings, and the recommendations for teaching inquiry science of exemplary elementary teachers and the ways that they use inquiry science in their classrooms. The findings reveal that the six exemplary teachers held ideas about inquiry as ‘‘finding things out’’ and all described themselves as having been children who explored and experimented with the world around them. The teachers in this group all recommended that when encouraging other teachers to implement inquiry, they need to first recognize its importance, and certainly this will take involving teachers in authentic inquiry experiences as learners so that they will be able to begin to view themselves, as these focus group teachers did, as problem-solvers and experimenters.

This study examines the political forces that have driven the development of performance funding in some states but not others. This study found that many of the actors and motives cited by the prevailing perspective operated in the six states, including state legislators, governors, and business people pursuing performance funding in the name of greater effectiveness and efficiency for higher education. However, the prevailing perspective misses the key advocacy role of state higher education coordinating boards and individual higher education institutions that pursued performance funding to secure new funds in an era of greater tax resistance and criticism of the effectiveness and efficiency of higher education.