New Teachers’ Perceptions on Being Prepared to Teach Students With Learning Disabilities: Insights From California

Abstract

Including students with learning disabilities (SWLDs) in general education classrooms is a priority nationwide. Consequently, now more than ever before in our nation’s history, university teacher education programs face increased responsibility to ensure general education teaching candidates receive adequate preparation to educate SWLDs. Many stakeholders believe that edTPA—a performance assessment used as a credential requirement—can be an important tool in helping to fulfill this goal. Utilizing survey data from a large, research university, the authors investigated how perceptions of preparation programs, including edTPA, related to general education teacher candidates’ perceptions of their preparation for educating SWLDs. Candidates reported feeling more prepared for disability policies if they believed their program was cohesive in its goals and expectations. Candidates who rated edTPA as beneficial for entering the teaching profession also believed that edTPA improved their abilities to educate SWLDs.

Preparedness and Experiences of Novice Teachers in the Sociopolitical Context of Heightened Immigration Enforcement: Evidence From a Survey of California Teachers

“…With a greater number of students, secondary teachers may have more opportunities to engage with those impacted by enforcement, and thus elements of their field placement are more directly tied to their perceptions of their abilities to support students. This aligns with prior research that has shown secondary teachers place a greater importance on the role of their supervisors with respect to preparedness to educate and support their students once inservice (Gottfried et al, 2019(Gottfried et al, , 2020.…”

“…Items soliciting perceptions of preservice training characteristics were reported on 5-point Likert-type scales, where preservice teachers could strongly disagree, disagree, neither agree or disagree, agree, or strongly agree to each question. These questions were derived from surveys used by Cohen and colleagues (2020) 2 surveying programs in a mid-Atlantic state and a pilot study at one of the TPPs in the UC System (Gottfried et al, 2019). As such, scales of preservice training used in these prior studies were constructed for the present study using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) as described below.…”

“The Voice of the Parent Cannot be Undervalued”: Pre-Service Teachers’ Observations after Listening to the Experiences of Parents of Students with Disabilities

“…Teachers often report feeling unprepared to work with students with disabilities [31,37,39,40]. Not all general education teacher preparation programs require an introductory course in basic special education constructs or working effectively with children with disabilities.…”

“…They found that 19% of the programs for initial certification in elementary education did not require even an introductory course in the characteristics of disability, 67% did not offer a course in inclusion or differentiation, and 93% did not offer a course in collaboration between general education and special education teachers. Prospective general education teachers who are learning about working with students with disabilities must also have knowledge of the disability laws, policies, and practices of their school district and must be prepared through their teacher-training program to understand those laws, policies, and practices [39].…”

Assessing the Status of Phonemic and Auditory Symptoms, and Examining the Effects of Dyslexic Phonemic R3 Approach on Reading Development of Indian Children with Dyslexia

“…Here /u/ represents a short sound. In the case of an open syllable, the vowel has a long sound like basin |ba| in an open syllable (Gottfried et al, 2019).…”