Counter-Intuitive Findings from Teacher Education Accreditation Council’s Surveys of Candidates and Faculty about Candidate Knowledge and Skill

Abstract

Contrary to assertions by critics that teacher education is broken, the students, faculty, and cooperating teachers in a large national sample of accredited teacher education programs rated the graduates of the programs in the ‘more than adequate’ to ‘excellent’ range with regard to the graduates’ knowledge of subject matter, pedagogy, multicultural understanding, instructional technology, the graduates’ skill to teach caringly and effectively and their capacity to develop professionally in their careers. Marginally lower ratings were given for the institution’s commitment to the program, the program’s facilities and resources, and the student support services. These results also occur in varyingly high degrees within each of the 50 programs in the sample. Furthermore, and provocatively, all the raters rated the adequacy of the graduates’ teaching skill significantly higher than they rated the adequacy graduates’ knowledge of their subject matter or pedagogy, and students’ ratings of the adequacy of their own understanding were strikingly unrelated to the grades they received and only modestly related to their ratings of the adequacy of their courses and faculty.