Corey Drake
Spyros Konstantopoulos
Two MSU College of Education scholars are part of a research team examining what happens in university-based teacher preparation programs that helps enhance teaching quality before individuals enter the profession.
Spyros Konstantopoulos, professor of measurement and quantitative methods, and Corey Drake, associate professor of teacher education and director of the Teacher Preparation Program at MSU, are part of a team based at University of Virginia leading the three-year study. Peter Youngs, associate professor at UVA and former faculty member at MSU, is serving as the principal investigator for the study.
The researchers are using $2.5 million in grants from the National Science Foundation and the Spencer Foundation to follow pre-service elementary teachers in their final year of teacher preparation and their first two years of full-time teaching. The study will track 300 elementary teacher candidates at six universities, including the University of Virginia, MSU, two more universities in Virginia and Michigan and two universities in Connecticut.
“We are trying to identify features of teacher preparation programs, including methods courses and student teaching placement, that support program graduates in enacting high-quality, ambitious teaching in mathematics and language arts,” Drake said. “We are also interested in learning how teacher candidates’ knowledge, beliefs and identity interact with these features of teacher preparation programs and potentially affect their instruction.
“In other words: What works in teacher preparation, for whom and under what conditions?”
During the first year of the study, the team will survey the teaching candidates, as well as university supervisors and mentor teachers who work with the candidates during their student teaching. The following two years will include classroom observations during three language arts lessons and three mathematics lessons, using teaching instruments developed or co-developed by UVA faculty.
More information can be found by visiting the Curry School of Education’s website.