Identification of Caring Professors in Teacher Education Programs.

This study involved developing a method for identifying caring teachers/professors in pre-service teacher education who can then be further studied as part of research on caring. For three semesters, the study gathered nominations from students in their last semester at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. A total of 417 students responded (42 percent response rate) to requests to make nominations of caring professors from the pool of teacher education professors. The study also requested nominations of caring professors by the faculty in the College of Education and Human Development and by faculty connected to the teacher education program. A total of nine percent of the faculty responded. All faculty in the four largest departments involved in teacher education were asked to submit one academic year's scores for selected questions from the standard teacher evaluation forms completed by students at the end of each semester for individual course instruction. Results indicated that teachers who were nominated as caring by their students had high teacher evaluation scores. Students identified 32 percent of the total faculty of the College of Education and Human Development as caring. Some of the results indicated that there was a high rate of nomination in the music education and art education departments, and that students were much more responsive to the request for nominations than were faculty. (Contains 34 references.) (SM)