Findings: Serious coursework
About 60 percent of undergraduate and graduate programs in our evaluation met our standard, with no undergraduate and only two graduate programs entirely failing to meet it.
How Illinois teacher preparation programs fare on this standard
The findings suggest that assignments with a "seriousness of purpose" are indeed found in professional coursework. However, there were troubling signs of assignments that these findings did not illuminate but which were a prevalent feature of many courses. Consider these examples:
- An assignment in a social studies methods course required a two-page field report that had to include no more than what might be found on a website: "the name, address, hours, etc. of a museum visited, a brief description of its purpose and general holdings, and a brief description of its educational services."
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A child-development course in which 25 percent of the grade is based on a "lot in life" paper. For this assignment each student is randomly assigned a condition (e.g., your child was born blind) and is then asked to write a firstperson narrative to describe and define the condition.
The connection between, in this case, being the parent of a blind child and teaching elementary school is not made—in fact, the course objectives and its assignments (like so many others we found) never make any explicit reference to the classroom or the implications for instruction of any material addressed.
- A course purporting to teach secondary teacher candidates how to instruct students with special needs in which 30 percent of the course grade is based on little more than a movie review.
These examples of assignments that do not have a seriousness of purpose for the purpose at hand—preparing teacher candidates for the classroom—encourage us to continue to refine this standard so that ratings better reflect this necessary aspect of assignments.
