Abstract
Welcome to the third issue of Volume 40. We hope you are ready for your fall semester. We also hope you plan to attend the TED conference in Savannah, GA. We plan to meet with all the board of reviewers and discuss the next several issues of Teacher Education and Special Education (TESE). As you know, TESE has received an impact factor. The TESE publication is now indexed and abstracted in Social Sciences Citation Index®, Journal Citation Reports/Social Sciences Edition, and Current Contents®/Social and Behavioral Sciences. Our Impact Factor rating is 0.881. Please Sign up for eTOC alerts and journal notifications at https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/action/showPreferences?menuTab=Alerts and encourage your students to do the same.
The current issue examines several topics related to preparation of special and general educators who serve students with disabilities. The first paper in the current issue is written by Alison Zagona, Jennifer Kurth, and Stephanie MacFarland and is titled “Teachers’ Views of Their Preparation for Inclusive Education and Collaboration.” The authors surveyed and interviewed general and special education teachers to understand their experiences and preparation to demonstrate skills associated with inclusive education and collaboration and to identify the factors that may contribute to the teachers’ preparation. They found a relationship between educators’ preparedness for inclusive education and whether they had taken university courses or had special training on inclusive education. The analysis of the interviews provided a deeper understanding of the educators’ preparation and experiences. The authors suggested that preservice teachers should have the opportunity to learn and practice the skills involved in advancing inclusive practices in practicum and student teaching placements.
The second paper, “Generalization Training in Special Education Teacher Preparation: Does It Exist?” written by Andrew Markelz, Benjamin Riden, and Mary Catherine Scheeler identified the extent to which a sample of special education teacher preparation programs were teaching their teacher candidates to generalize newly acquired teaching skills to in-service K-12 settings. Their results indicated ambiguity with familiarity of generalization techniques and fidelity of implementation. Programming for generalization was absent in the reviewed course syllabi. In addition, student teaching supervisors who were contacted reported disconnects between university and classroom realities. The authors recommended a systematic approach to programming for generalization by increasing awareness of generalization techniques.
The third paper, written by Cynthia Dieterich, Paula Chan, and Anne Price, discussed the legal implications for accommodating students with disabilities in teacher preparation field placements. Their purpose was to provide an overview of legal precedent for working with students with disabilities in teacher preparation programs. The authors reviewed federal legislation for students with disabilities in higher education, presented recent case law related to accommodating students with disabilities in college training programs with field components, and provided suggestions for faculty working with students with disabilities who were participating in supervised field internships. Their paper is a must read for any faculty member who serves on his or her institution’s disabilities services committee.
The fourth paper titled “Pre-Service Teachers’ Knowledge, Misconceptions and Gaps About Autism Spectrum Disorder,” written by Pilar Sanz-Cervera, Maria-Inmaculada Fernández-Andrés, Gemma Pastor-Cerezuela, and Raúl Tárraga-Mínguez, compared 866 preservice teachers’ knowledge, misconceptions, and gaps about autism in their first and final year at a university, using the Autism Knowledge Questionnaire. Their results illustrated that fourth-year students obtained higher levels of knowledge and fewer gaps than the first-year students although they also had more misconceptions. Special education specialists obtained significantly more knowledge and fewer misconceptions than their general education preservice teachers. Specific training and experience had a significant influence on the knowledge and gaps but it had no influence on the number of misconceptions. The authors concluded that given the increasing number of students diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), preservice teachers need to have more comprehensive knowledge about the disorder and be prepared to use evidence-based practices for this population. The need for further coursework and training including a field experience component is necessary for both general and special education preservice teachers.
In the final paper, Elif Tekin-Iftar, Belva Collins, Fred Spooner, and Seray Olcay-Gul used a multiple baseline design across dyads to examine the effects of professional development with coaching to train general education teachers to use a simultaneous prompting procedure when teaching academic core content to students with autism. Three teacher–student dyads participated in the study. Their results showed that teachers acquired the ability to use the simultaneous prompting procedure with 100% accuracy and maintained the acquired teaching behaviors over time and generalized them in teaching new academic content to their students. The students acquired the targeted academic content, maintained it over time, and generalized it across different persons and settings. The authors’ conclusions included the recommendation that future studies be conducted to use professional development to teach other response prompting procedures to general education teachers who have students with ASD or other types of disabilities in their classrooms.
Our vision for TESE is to continue the long-standing tradition of publishing high quality research and commentary on teacher education and special education. We hope to increase the number of manuscripts reviewed; so please send in your manuscripts (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tese). We also look forward to increasing our readership nationally and internationally; we hope you will encourage your friends to read TESE. In addition, we have several links available for our readers on special topics and issues. These links will allow you to find several articles on one topic. Please see the following link: http://tes.sagepub.com/cgi/collection. We hope to also widen our viewership by continuing to provide podcasts on topics we examine at TESE.
We recognize that the success of TESE is a collaborative, team effort. The TESE journal is only as good as the manuscripts received and the quality of the reviews posted by members of the editorial board. We want to thank in advance those of you who will submit your best work in the area of teacher preparation to TESE, as well as those on the Board of Reviewers who will spend quality time providing thoughtful and constructive suggestions to their colleagues. We look forward to receiving your manuscripts, reviews, feedback, and ideas to improve the journal. Together, we can continue TESE’s tradition of quality scholarship!