Background: For schools to include quality STEM education, it is important to understand teachers' beliefs and perceptions related to STEM talent development. Teachers, as important persons within a student's talent development, hold prior views and experiences that will influence their STEM instruction. This study attempts to understand what is known about teachers' perceptions of STEM education by examining existing literature. Results: Study inclusion criteria consisted of empirical articles, which aligned with research questions, published in a scholarly journal between 2000 and 2016 in English. Participants included in primary studies were preK-12 teachers. After quality assessment, 25 articles were included in the analysis. Thematic analysis was used to find themes within the data. Findings indicate that while teachers value STEM education, they reported barriers such as pedagogical challenges, curriculum challenges, structural challenges, concerns about students, concerns about assessments, and lack of teacher support. Teachers felt supports that would improve their effort to implement STEM education included collaboration with peers, quality curriculum, district support, prior experiences, and effective professional development. Conclusions:Recommendations for practice include quality in-service instruction over STEM pedagogy best practices and district support of collaboration time with peer teachers. Recommendations for future research are given.

To provide further generalizability for the results garnered by two previous studies, the authors conducted a methodological replication. In addition to adding to the body of replication research done with gifted students, the purpose of this study was to examine perfectionism differences among gifted adolescents in regards to gender, birth order, and grade level. Gifted adolescents enrolled in a rural middle and high school ( N = 96) responded to the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale. Results revealed differences in regard to birth order, gender, and grade level. These results suggest that more research needs to be conducted to determine the relationship between perfectionism and gender, birth order, and age/grade level. Implications for parents, practitioners, and counselors are discussed.

There exists much potential for the use of community-based partnerships to support preservice teachers' learning and development. These opportunities can also expand preservice teachers' understanding of when and where teaching and learning take place. This paper reports the results of a qualitative, yearlong pilot study focused on secondary preservice teachers' (N = 42) weekly community-based field experiences at a newly opened secondary public museum school, located in a large Midwestern urban area. Specifically, preservice teachers worked weekly with sixth grade students in an urban public museum setting as part of a required undergraduate content area literacy teacher education course. This study highlights ways this community-based field experience served as an important clinical component for preservice teacher learning. Working in this community-based setting provided expanded and varied opportunities for preservice teacher learning, including practice using and facilitating small group instruction and opportunities to support adolescents' learning through accessing, exploring, and examining museum artifacts and exhibits. Therefore, community-based field experiences, when and where feasible, may serve as an important clinical component for preservice teacher learning.

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