Findings: Early field work
The evaluated undergraduate secondary, graduate secondary and undergraduate special programs uniformly met this standard. Undergraduate and graduate elementary programs did almost as well, with 97 percent and 95 percent, respectively, meeting the standard. The worst results were for graduate special education, where one-third of the programs we reviewed did not meet the standard.
There was considerable variation among programs in terms of field work requirements (not including student teaching) along three dimensions:
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The total number of hours required.
As the table below indicates, the differences within programs in the total number of hours required are large: from an 85-hour difference between the program with the highest requirements and the program with the lowest (graduate secondary) to an over 400-hour difference (undergraduate early childhood education).
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The nature of the required field work. The type of field work experiences varied, including whole class observations, individual observations, tutoring individual students or small groups of students, serving as a teacher's assistant and conducting projects.
By far the most common field work activity appears to be serving as a teacher's assistant.
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The distribution of field work. Some programs make the field experiences a part of professional coursework while others consolidate the experiences into discrete practicums.
These variations occurred both across education schools and within education schools when examining different preparation programs.
How Illinois institutions fare on this standard
