On the outside, it seems like a pretty nice line-up of courses. We have a nice variety, including Diversity Issues (Y2), Cognition and the Exceptional Learner (Y5), Professionalism and Law (Y6), and even Cognition of Learning (Y3). However, if we look a bit closer, we begin to see some ideological and possible vested-interest courses: Twenty-First Century Literacies (Y4), as well as Teaching Digital Learners in the Digital Age (Y5). The effect of technology on our learners has small variable impact when compared to big-ticket items such as teachers reflecting on how much surface knowledge is needed before eliciting deeper thinking in students, or teachers understanding how to assess what students know and moving them towards specific success criteria. Why is it that courses regarding technology receive a hefty two semester presence over a course like Cognition of Learning that has great potential to better inform our pre-service teachers about evidence-based practices that will have a greater impact on their learners?

I am under the impression that Mathematics Methods courses tend to receive a similar treatment - that is evidence-based practices get back-seat to ideology or vested-interests (pages 95-100 of the NCTQ's 2008 report are an interesting read). This study by Laski et al., for example, questioned 204 mathematics methods course instructors in the United States and found some interesting results.

Only about 23% of the instructors questioned deemed an understanding of basic cognitive & learning processes (such as memory, encoding, attention, and automaticity) very important for the preparation of pre-service teachers in elementary mathematics. Common mathematical misconceptions and developmental sequences of mathematics (two topics important in the development of pedagogical content knowledge) were much higher with 57% and 48% of instructors ranking these as very important, respectively. Sources such as John Hattie and Daniel Willingham continue to remind us of the importance of pedagogical content knowledge in teachers' training - so I find it odd that more mathematics methods instructors are not rating these aspects as very important. An excellent methods course should be designed, in part, to help develop pedagogical content knowledge in our pre-service teachers.

Laski et al. also found the frequencies in which methods instructors accessed psychology journals very low. The journal that seemed to be accessed the most was Cognition and Instruction, with 36% of the instructors never having accessed this journal (only 8% of instructors frequently accessing it). The frequencies in which all other scientific journals (including Developmental Psychology and Journal of Educational Psychology) were accessed was lower, with 48 - 68% of instructors stating that they had never accessed these resources. Laski et al. do state that access to journals may be an issue preventing teacher trainers from reading current psychology journals; however, these individuals should have access through their respective institutions. This begs a few questions: Is access to evidence-based research truly an issue? Where are our mathematics methods instructors getting their current research? Is their current research evidence-based? Is this current research helping with the preparation of our pre-service teachers to become effective teachers?