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Previous research into student teachers’ knowledge about language concluded that overall the picture was fairly bleak. Such research focused on the knowledge about language that the student teachers possessed when they moved from secondary school education into Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes. However, few studies have investigated the impact of the increasing demands on teachers, made in curricular documents throughout the last 20 years, to improve students’ abilities in language and whether student teachers’ knowledge about language had improved as a result of these curricular imperatives. This article reports on research into perceived and actual levels of knowledge about language conducted in a university in Scotland with students training to be primary teachers and secondary English and modern language teachers. Findings reveal that student teachers’ levels of linguistic knowledge, as measured by the instrument employed in this study, are generally low contrasting with their own more posit...

Debate around the use of ability grouping in schools, resonates across national boundaries as concerns rise around the possible negative impact on young people, particularly those in already disadvantaged groups. In this paper, a survey focussing on primary schools in Scotland established the extent to which some form of ability grouping has emerged within classes dealing with children from 5 to 12 years of age, the rationale behind the decisions made and the issues and challenges faced by schools.

This paper is intended as a contribution to the debate and evaluation activity which in the UK is following Dearing's recommendation that more work experience should be provided for more higher education students. The paper gives an instrument for researching students’ perceptions of the roles their workplace supervisors play. Two surveys using the instrument and involving a total of 669 students on different courses in the field of teacher education are reported. In the surveys, the responses of many students suggested that they had received ‘good’ (i.e. theoretically desirable) supervision in the workplace but this was not the case for all students. There were for example clear differences across courses and, in addition, the course whose students appeared to have experienced the least desirable kind of supervision subsequently suffered the highest rate of student drop‐out. In contrast, students who had apparently received the ‘best’ kind of workplace supervision tended to be happier with their...

The study described in this paper reports findings in line with previous studies that discern more support than challenge in the area of teacher education concerned with mentoring of student teachers by teachers. Thus, the teachers say that support was their main emphasis, and challenge a lesser emphasis when they worked with the student teachers. Their students, however, seem unaware even of the amount of challenge which the teachers thought they offered. The paper discusses these findings and puts forward an interpretation based on a comparison drawn from the field of colour perception. The paper's conclusion, in drawing attention to the effects which support and challenge might have on one another when they are in combination, endorses the view that it is important not only to study the nature of challenge and support in themselves but also to study the relationship between them.

Initial teacher training courses throughout the United Kingdom at present have been or are being changed in various ways which enlarge the role of schools and make new demands on the school teachers who act as mentors to student teachers in the schools. Despite the size of this change, it can be quite difficult to find evidence about its effects. Edwards (1994) suggested that one reason for this lack of evidence is that there has been little government support for obtaining it. As Edwards points out, however, the government in one part of the United Kingdom, namely Scotland, did ensure that evidence about the mentor teacher idea was obtained before there was a decision about applying the scheme across the country. The decision that it should be nationally applied was reported in this journal's ‘Notes and News’ section in Spring 1995, under the heading of ‘Introduction of a mentor scheme in Scotland’. This paper summarises the main outcomes of the pilot study which informed that decision. The pape...

Issues have been raised in The Cambridge Journal of Education by Edwards and by Booth about how the work of schools and colleges in initial teacher training can be complementary. In the study reported here, arrangements were made for teachers to spend time mentoring students. The students reported feeling the benefit of this. Although the mentors felt that even more time was required for mentoring than was officially allocated, they were positive about the value of mentoring. Their self‐reports showed that they had perceived themselves as playing roles which could be viewed as complementary to, rather than as duplicating, the roles of tutors. Accordingly, the study brings evidence to bear on the current debate about complementarity in the roles of colleges and schools in initial teacher training

The context of the survey reported in this paper is the new policy about teacher education in the UK. The policy is described with examples from England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. Scotland is farthest forward with change. The survey which is reported is of expectations among the first students enrolled for teacher education under the new arrangements in Scotland. The paper discusses the survey's findings in the light of current debate among researchers about the contributions of schools and colleges to initial teacher education.

Many students in Britain, especially those training for the professions, do parts of their courses in the form of placements in the field. Most such placements are compulsory. During placements students are the joint concern of their tutors on the campus and their mentors in the field. The placements on the different courses seem dramatically different. For example, some placements are in primary schools, some in hospital wards, some in factory pharmacies and some in electrical power stations. This study shows, however, that despite such obvious differences in the placement settings, student feelings about placement can be remarkably similar. For staff whose courses include placement there are issues which they could usefully discuss in common.

This paper describes a technique for measuring nurse students' feelings about their placements. The method is a semantic differential scale. The scale is robust and we have researched it over a long period with various professions who include placement in their training. It has not been used in nurse education before, but will be a very useful resource indeed to nurse teachers who want to know how their students feel about their placements. The scale gives a general picture of how students feel about a placement generally; it will also show you, more specifically, how students feel about the value, relevance, breadth, liveliness and organisation of their placement. The paper describes how to administer the scale and how to score the results. It also gives some results in graphic (profiled) form, as well as in tables, in order to demonstrate the method and its possibilities in the field of nursing education.