Using Practice-Based Teacher Education Pedagogies to Strengthen Middle Level Candidates’ Applications of the Science of Learning

Preparing middle level teacher candidates to articulate a rationale for and successfully enact a variety of effective, developmentally responsive instructional strategies requires purposefully designed teacher education experiences. Recent teacher preparation research suggests that pedagogical approaches from practice-based teacher education and a curricular focus on the science of learning may support teacher candidate uptake of these instructional decision-making skills. Using a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design, this study examined learning outcomes of teacher candidates in a redesigned undergraduate middle level preparation program who were taught the science of learning through increasingly complex pedagogies of enactment. Results indicated that participants’ capacity for understanding and applying science of learning principles increased during the intervention. Detailed examples illustrating one teacher educator’s use of representations, decomposition, and approximations to teach science of learning applications to middle level teacher candidates are included. Multiple recommendations for further research in the field of middle grades teacher preparation are also discussed.