3. Type of Research: Quantitative (Survey) and Qualitative (Descriptive Studies). Researchers: Elizabeth Graue and Christopher P. Brown. Research Question: What do teacher educators need to know about the idea prospective teachers bring into their education to support interaction with families? Purpose: to make our curriculum more responsive to the experiences and beliefs of our students. With a commitment to supporting more equitable relationships between parents and teachers, we wanted to help prospective teachers see parents as collaborative in education who had much to contribute. Sample: 130 newly admitted undergraduate teacher education students at a large public university in the Midwestern United States in 2001 (75 students in the elementary program and 55 students in secondary program). Methods: Survey.
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6. This survey is part of a broader project examining student’s developments of beliefs about home-school relation during a teacher education program. This broader project includes surveys across the five semesters of their professional program, analyses of course syllabi, interviews with instructors and interviews with a small sample of prospective teachers as they make their way through the program. We report only the results of the first semester survey in this research.
7. ** They designed a study that would provide descriptive examination of incoming teacher education student’s conceptions of home-school relations, balancing attention to the large number of students in our programs with the complex challenge of understanding belief and experience. ** The survey research provide a window on the belief and memories of approximately 130 students as they begin their teacher education programs.
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9. 1- Gender. 2- Race/Ethnicity. 3- Date of birth. 4- Mother’s highest level of education. 5- Childhood community. 6- Parental status.
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12. 1- What memories do prospective teachers hold of their own family’s school involvement? 2- How do they conceptualize the knowledge and roles of parents and teachers in education? 3- How do they anticipate that they will involve families in their own teaching? ** Survey of teachers indicate that elementary schools are more likely to have stronger positive programs of parents involvement that secondary schools.
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19. They concluded that prospective teachers come to their professional education with well-developed notions of the interactions that families should have with schools. Their ascription of parent and teacher knowledge could be described as either complementary or conflicting with very little overlap for the two groups. Parent knowledge was long term, individual, biased and familial while teacher knowledge was professional, un-biased and based on experience with large number of children.
20. ** what do we miss by giving lip service to parental roles in education but not working systematically to foster those roles in teacher education? Teachers are losing key opportunities for support, knowledge, and collaboration by holding parents at arms’ length.
