Teacher preparation practices refer to the approaches, activities, and processes that teacher educators employ to enhance preservice teachers’ knowledge, skill, and dispositions. While researchers and policymakers have been actively identifying the most effective teacher preparation practices, the lack of rigorous evaluations of these practices is of concern because their effectiveness in different contexts remains unclear. Therefore, a recent review systematically examined the research designs of relevant studies conducted over the past two decades.
An online database and hand search of relevant studies published in peer-reviewed journals between 2002 and 2019 yielded 166 eligible studies. In terms of internal validity, only 26.67% of the studies used a comparison group design to address maturation effects, and only 15.66% reported reasons why participants left during the study. Regarding measurement, 45.18% used a clearly defined and consistent rating scheme; 18.67% used measures developed by other researchers; 24.7% investigated the effect of teacher preparation practices on preservice teachers’ practice and/or student outcomes; and only 6.02% collected outcome measures over different time points to evaluate long-term effects. Regarding external validity, the representativeness of participants was a concern for only one study that compared participants with preservice teachers, and the specific study contexts were not clearly reported. Another concern was about the scalability of instructors because only 16 studies addressed multiple-instructor effects, and 85 studies included at least one author as the instructor.
These findings suggest a call for more rigorous impact evaluations of teacher preparation practices. Besides providing a checklist of future research designs, the author made general recommendations for future research.
Source: Mancenido, Z. (2023). Impact Evaluations of teacher preparation practices: Challenges and opportunities for more rigorous research. Review of Educational Research, 00346543231174413. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543231174413