The authors propose a framework for teacher preparation programs that aims to help prospective teachers learn how to teach from studying teaching. The framework is motivated by their interest in defining a set of competencies that provide a deliberate, systematic path to becoming an effective teacher over time. The framework is composed of four skills, rooted in the daily activity of teaching, that when deployed deliberately and systematically, constitute a process of creating and testing hypotheses about cause-effect relationships between teaching and learning during classroom lessons. In spite of the challenges of acquiring these skills, the authors argue that the framework outlines a more realistic and more promising set of beginning teacher competencies than those of traditional programs designed to produce graduates with expert teaching strategies.

For several historical and cultural reasons, the United States has long pursued a strategy of improving teaching by improving teachers. The rarely questioned logic underlying this choice says that by improving the right characteristics of teachers, they will teach more effectively. The authors expose the assumptions on which this logic is built, propose an alternative approach to improving teaching that engages teachers (and researchers) directly in the work of improving teaching, present some indirect evidence to support this approach, and examine the cultural traditions and beliefs that have kept the conventional approach in place for so long.

This study investigates the differences in children's comprehension and enjoyment of storybooks according to the medium of presentation. Two different storybooks were used and 132 children participated. Of these, 51 children read an extract from The Magicians of Caprona , about half reading an electronic version with an online dictionary, and the rest reading a printed version with a separate printed dictionary. The remaining 81 children read an extract from The Little Prince , 26 reading an electronic version, 26 reading the same but with narration and 29 reading a printed version. No dictionary was supplied with this storybook. The type of medium did not significantly affect the children's enjoyment of either storybook, and while it took them longer to read the electronic versions, this difference was only significant for The Little Prince . For both storybooks, comprehension scores were higher for retrievaltype questions than for inference ones. The use of the online dictionary in the electronic condition of The Magicians of Caprona was significantly greater than that for the printed dictionary in that condition. The provision of narration in the electronic version of The Little Prince led to significantly higher comprehension scores than when narration was absent. IntroductionTechniques to aid and improve children's reading skills and to motivate them towards further reading are always of interest to educationalists and to those involved in educational research. Thus, it is unsurprising that the increased availability of children's storybooks in electronic format should be an area of research interest.

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The goal of this study is to uncover the successes and challenges that preservice teachers are likely to experience as they unpack lesson-level mathematical learning goals (i.e., identify the subconcepts and subskills that feed into target learning goals). Unpacking learning goals is a form of specialized mathematical knowledge for teaching, an essential starting point for studying and improving one's teaching. Thirty K–8 preservice teachers completed 4 written tasks. Each task specified a learning goal and then asked the preservice teachers to complete a teaching activity with this goal in mind. For example, preservice teachers were asked to evaluate whether a student's responses to a series of mathematics problems showed understanding of decimal number addition. The results indicate that preservice teachers can identify mathematical subconcepts of learning goals in supportive contexts but do not spontaneously apply a strategy of unpacking learning goals to plan for, or evaluate, teaching and learning. Implications for preservice education are discussed.

This study investigated the learning-from-practice skills that pre-service teachers possess when they enter teacher preparation programs in the United States. Two subskills were hypothesized to represent, at least in part, what is required to learn from practice: (1) the ability to collect evidence about studentsÕ learning in order to analyze the effects of instruction, and (2) the ability to use the analysis to revise the instruction. Because it seems likely that different teaching situations and contexts reveal these learning-from-practice skills in different ways and to different degrees, this study examined the skills that pre-service teachers exhibited under two experimental conditions. Thirty pre-service teachers were asked to analyze the effects of a videotaped mathematics lesson on student learning, to support their analysis with evidence, and to use their analysis to revise the lesson. Based on the results, it appears that many entry level pre-service teachers can carry out a cause-effect type of analysis of the relationships between specific instructional strategies and studentsÕ learning, and can use this analysis to make productive revisions to the instruction. However, prospective teachersÕ ability to collect evidence that supports their analysis appears to be less developed. In addition, the type of analysis that prospective teachers carried out about the effects of instruction on studentsÕ learning differed dramatically across the two experimental task conditions.

In the past year, we have used this space to tackle a chronic and important concern in mathematics education: how to increase the impact of research on practice. Because of the unique nature of this issue of JRME, we pause to address the critical idea of replication in educational research. In later issues, we will continue our primary theme and consider how the ideas raised in this editorial can further our understanding of the relationships between research and practice.