Epistemology and prospective content-area teacher candidates: preparing for teaching adolescent literacy.

Abstract

Research into student epistemology provides us with descriptions of learners as they encounter academic challenges. Content-area teachers approach the problem of teaching adolescent literacy with particular attitudes toward learning, knowledge, and texts, and these beliefs affect their effectiveness as future literacy teachers. This project investigated content-area pre-service teachers' beliefs about knowledge, learning, and texts, adding to the literature about teacher-candidate epistemology and content-area literacy teaching. The study utilized mixed methods: content-area teacher candidates were surveyed in the first stage of the research study, and a sample of these candidates were interviewed in the second stage of the study. Research findings included the development of a new inventory for learner epistemology measurement. This epistemology of reading inventory offers researchers and educators a measure of learners' beliefs about reading, texts, and comprehension. Study results offer a salient description of teacher candidates' epistemological traits as they approach the problem of teaching content-area reading and literacy to adolescents.