Chapter 4: Educating Effective Science Teachers: Preparing and Following Teachers Into the Field

The landscape of teacher preparation is complex and from a research perspective presents itself as a multilevel, multivariable puzzle. For decades, federal and state policymakers, teacher education institutions, educational researchers, school districts, administrators, and other stakeholders have tried to determine and measure the key, malleable factors that result in effective teaching. In a still-referenced vision of teacher preparation, Bransford, Darling-Hammond, and LePage (2007) highlighted three areas of skills, knowledge, and dispositions important for teaching effectiveness:

In the United States, due to a lack of standardization, a large variety of approaches to teacher education have been developed and are overseen by a similarly wide range of state certification policies that affect over 2,100 teacher preparation programs (TPPs; National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 2016). Through all the research that has been conducted on teacher preparation, no one factor can independently account for observed variability in teacher effectiveness; however, rarely has research been conducted systematically to better inform optimal TPP designs. To address the knowledge gap, Cochran-Smith and Villegas (2016) encourage educational researchers to produce studies that examine “the impact and implications of particular mixes of teacher characteristics, school contexts, and program features” (p. 458). Such studies are especially needed in science education, specifically of TPPs that focus on practicing teaching and learning science using scientific practices (i.e., collecting and analyzing data, carrying out investigations), collaborative work, or a project-based approach to understand science content (van Driel, Berry, & Meirink, 2014; Windschitl & Stroupe, 2017). Due to space constraints we also refer readers to chapters on science teacher preparation (Loughran, 2014) and teacher knowledge (van Driel et al., 2014) for more comprehensive reviews.