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The effectiveness of a well‐known prejudice‐reduction simulation, “Blue Eyes‐Brown Eyes,” was assessed as a tool for changing the attitudes of nonblack teacher education students toward blacks. The three outcomes were (a) virtually all of the subjects reported that the experience was meaningful for them; (b) the statistical evidence supporting the effectiveness of the activity for prejudice reduction was moderate; and (c) virtually all of the participants, as well as the simulation facilitator, reported stress from the simulation.

This study examined the perceptions of elementary school beginning teachers (n = 136) across a Rocky Mountain state in the US regarding the mentoring support they received during their first year teaching. Beginning teachers were asked to report the types of mentoring support they received and to rate the helpfulness of this support on the Mentoring Support Survey. Individual item scores and scale scores are reported. An analysis of variance was then used to compare the scale scores of teachers with the administrator-facilitated mentoring supports of common planning time with their mentors and/or release time to observe other teachers. Results indicate that beginning teachers who received both common planning time with a mentor and release time to observe other teachers rated the mentoring experiences they had as significantly more helpful than beginning teachers who were not provided these mentoring supports. Of the two, provision of common planning time was the most important type of administrator-facilitated support.

This study presents findings on the reliability and validity of a group-assessment interview procedure designed to evaluate the verbal, interpersonal, and leadership qualities of students applying to a teacher-education program. We examine whether (a) the group-assessment process predicts future student-teaching performance, (b) the group-assessment scores are reliable across raters, and (c) the group-assessment interview is a better predictor of student-teaching performance than academic criteria. After gathering data from 68 student-teachers who had previously participated in the group-assessment process, we found that the group-assessment overall rating predicts student-teaching performance and does so better than academic criteria. Finally, we found high interrater reliability on the group-assessment measures.

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