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I began this review with three objectives: (a) to determine whether recent learning-to-teach studies form a coherent body of literature, (b) to use any common themes that emerged from these studies to construct a model of professional growth for novice and beginning teachers, and (c) to draw inferences from the model concerning the nature of preservice teacher education programs likely to promote growth by capitalizing on naturally occurring processes and stages. I review 40 learning-to-teach studies published or presented between 1987 and 1991: 27 deal with preservice teachers, 13 with first-year or beginning teachers. All were naturalistic and qualitative in methodology. Studies within each of those divisions are clustered and summarized according to major themes that emerged from findings. The model I ultimately infer from the 40 studies confirms, explicates, and integrates Fuller’s ( Fuller & Bown, 1975 ) developmental model of teacher concerns and Berliner’s (1988) model of teacher development based on cognitive studies of expertise. Preservice and first-year teaching appears to constitute a single developmental stage during which novices accomplish three primary tasks: (a) acquire knowledge of pupils; (b) use that knowledge to modify and reconstruct their personal images of self as teacher; and (c) develop standard procedural routines that integrate classroom management and instruction. In general, preservice programs fail to address these tasks adequately.

Although research on teacher cognition is no longer in its infancy, it has largely failed to affect the ways in which programs and teachers are evaluated. In accordance with what Raths and Katz (1985) call the Goldilocks Principle, the notion of teacher cognition may simply be “too big” (too general and vague) for mundane application. This review was designed to compare alternative approaches to the evaluation of teacher cognition and to consider ways in which the literature of this subfield may be discouraging its application. Teacher cognition is defined as pre- or inservice teachers’ self-reflections; beliefs and knowledge about teaching, students, and content; and awareness of problem-solving strategies endemic to classroom teaching. This paper describes and critiques five different approaches to the evaluation of teacher cognition: (a) direct and noninferential ways of assessing teacher belief, (b) methods that rely on contextual analyses of teachers’ descriptive language, (c) taxonomies for assessing self-reflection and metacognition, (d) multimethod evaluations of pedagogical content knowledge and beliefs, and (e) concept mapping. In the final section, ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in this literature are discussed, particularly the continued use of rhetoric associated with process–product research. Questions regarding the ecological validity of measurement tools and tasks are raised. A suggestion is made that it may be politically exigent to begin relating measures of teacher cognition to valued student outcomes.

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